Face to face, rock stars almost always underwhelm. Listening to their music, one forms a picture of how a favourite artist should dress and sound and act. Confronted by the reality – as well as being shorter than you imagine, celebs tend to be crabby, unglamorous and, in Madonna’s case, have claws for hands – such necessary illusions whither before your eyes.

Waif-like and with the complexion of china doll left too long in the rain, Annie Hardy, of Los Angeles avant-rock duo Giant Drag, is not such a rock star. She looks, if not glamorous exactly (her indie boho chic represents a kind of anti-glamour), then undeniably striking, in a ghostly Cissy Spacek-plays-Carrie sort of way.
Peering at you from beneath long, lank tresses Hardy is, in fact, the living embodiment of Giant Drag’s languid shoegaze drone. On record she coos in the manner of an expiring dove; in person she converses in slow, drowsy sentences that don’t necessarily lead anywhere but are fascinating to listen to.
Asked, for instance, whether she is a fan of the ‘90s indie scene – the influence of, in particular, Pixies and Breeders is writ large on the Giant Drag songbook – Hardy shrugs and stares into the middle distance. When, eventually, she speaks, the words flow like treacle.
“Y’know, I guess I listened to that music. I was around in the ‘90s. I suppose there was an influence. I liked some of the bands from that period,” she says, tailing off into a somewhat perplexed silence. Has she forgotten the question?
Happily – for the interviewer at least – Giant Drag drummer/keyboardist Micah Calabrese, riding gunshot for Hardy this afternoon , is in the habit of finishing the singer’s thoughts for her . A deadpan Italian-American, he recalls getting to know Annie through...well, his mom.
“I was writing songs and Annie was writing songs. We were both looking for a project. My mom knew Annie’s mom. It was suggested that we might work together. Annie came to meet me at my place. She had a bunch of tunes and an acoustic guitar. As soon as we started playing, we knew something special was happening.”
Calabrese grew up in LA; Hardy lived for many years in the neighbouring Orange County. Quizzed about the city’s reputation for simultaneously wallowing in seediness and glamour, they appear a tad disconcerted. Apparently the LA you and I have come to know, through television and detective fiction, bears no resemblance to the town they call home.
“If you’re talking about Sunset Strip and all that then, yeah, I suppose you could say there’s a degree of seediness there,” says Hardy. “But where we live, in Echo Park, [ southern California’s bohemian hotspot] it’s pretty chilled out. It’s not really like the LA you see in the movies. There are a lot of artists there. Everyone is pretty friendly. It’s one big community.”
Barb-wire lyrics are a notable feature of Giant Drag’s otherwise soporific debut, Hearts And Unicorns; song titles such as ‘Kevin Is Gay’ (about a friend, who, incidentally isn’t) and ‘My Dick Sux’, in particular, rather belie Hardy’s little-girl-lost image.
“We enjoy that contrast between the dark and the light in our stuff,” she says. “It’s something we aim for. I think it’s pretty neat that you can listen to something that sounds sweet and harmonious but there’s a sting in the end. That’s a pretty good way of describing our music, I think.”

Hearts And Unicorns is out on Polydor