August Rush

If Billy McCarthy wasn’t fronting a band right now, he’d probably be sitting in his New York apartment crying his eyes out. “I sustained a heavy blow – I lost my little brother,” says McCarthy, leader of heavily touted Brooklyn rockers We Are Augustines. “Writing has helped me deal with it. There’s been a lot of catharsis.”

In 2009 Billy’s younger sibling James took his own life. He’d suffered bipolar disorder and had spent time in institutions and behind bars. For Billy, his death was a horrible case of history repeating itself. The boys’ mother was a schizophrenic alcoholic who’d put her family in foster care when she could no longer cope. It’s hard to talk with McCarthy about any of this without feeling hopelessly glib.
He takes the tension out of the conversation by bringing the subject up himself. McCarthy isn’t picking at scabs or looking for attention. His brother’s suicide has had a direct bearing on his work. The stand-out track on We Are Augustines’ Springseen-esque debut – the song that forces you to sit up and take notice – is called ‘Book Of James’. It straightforwardly addresses his bereavement. Until the moment he wrote it, McCarthy, who’d previously sang with zeitgeisty mid noughties crew Pela, wasn’t sure he even wanted to be in a band again.
“Honestly dude, if I didn’t have a new record to talk about I’d be at home grieving,” he admits. “This has allowed me to champion my brother – to champion people who don’t have it good and come from a hard place. It has turned it into an empowering thing.”
You are likely sick to the eyeballs of self-proclaimed ‘blue collar’ American bands and their half-assed ‘Born To Run’ pastiches by now. We Are Augustines are different. Even if you’re immune to the charms of chest-beating man-rawk, chances are you’ll find something in their songbook that, if only for a fleeting moment, makes you glad to be alive.
‘Book Of James’ came together on a sojourn in Canada, where McCarthy and former Pela bassist Eric Sanderson had gone to lay down demos with Broken Social Scene producer Dave Newfield. The end of Pela was drawn out and painful and the pair weren’t sure if they needed to go through that kind of shit again.
“I actually wrote it in a closet,” he laughs. “I wanted to go somewhere quiet. I was in this huge apartment in Toronto. I went into the walk in wardrobe. It was quiet. So I sat there and wrote. The lyrics just came out of me like that. I only had to make one or two changes. I thought, ‘Woah, this is coming from a pure place.’ I’m picky about what I do. For the first time in my life, I’d written a song I couldn’t criticise, couldn’t pull apart.”
Sighing, he runs a hand through his hair.
“I have to tell you dude, talking about this is as strange for me as it is for you. I’m sitting here discussing something I have no experience of. It’s profound and awkward. I’ve never seen anything like this in the world of music.”
His brother’s death coincided with the final throes of Pela’s messy break-up. The band desperately wanted out of what they regarded as a terribly unfair deal with the small indie label they’d signed to. After two years of wrangling, pulling the plug seemed the best decision. What eats at McCarthy is the knowledge that, had they fetched up a few years earlier, they would have been snapped up by a major and would have had at least a decent tilt at success.
“Pela was a much beloved thing,” he reflects. ‘We were a loud rock band, a high energy band. People would come to our shows, have a bunch of beers, enjoy themselves. It was a weird time in the music business, unluckily for us. In the early ‘00s, after The Strokes and The Shins, labels got excited about rock bands. You had The Thrills, The Kills, The Spills, The Killers – on and on it went. After that came a big freeze. It was post-Napster. Labels stopped signing people. So we were selling out theatres and couldn’t get a deal. Through no fault of our own, we were a little marooned.”
Pela considered putting an album out themselves. In the end, they blinked and decided it was better to hook up with the one indie that had meaningfully courted them. It was a fateful step.
“We were in this weird position of signing to an upstart label that wanted our signature. They gave us very little money so we produced the record ourselves. These things can be very binding. They basically took us off the market at a very cheap price. We wanted out so bad that in the end we thought, ‘well that’s it’. And we were done.”
You can’t imagine We Are Augustines sputtering out so inauspiciously. Championed by college radio stations across America and with a turn at the UK’s XFM Winter Wonderland under their belts, already the band has created a medium-sized splash on both sides of the Atlantic. With their debut Rise Ye Sunken Ships enjoying viral success, there’s a sense that the group are about to take off – that the next time they play London’s 5,000 capacity Brixton Academy, they’ll be headlining.
“It’s strange,” reflects McCarthy. “This looked like such a hopeless project for me. Then I wrote that one song about my brother and everything changed. It’s difficult for me to take it all in.”

Rise Ye Sunken Ships is out on March 5.