Holy puck

They say no band should march on an empty stomach, which might explain why Hockey are sitting in a café on Dublin’s Camden Street, tucking into veggie fry-ups and copious amounts of coffee. Curly-bonced bassist Jerm, who also designs the band’s artwork, is chatty as he explains how he and singer Ben formed the group, tipped for great things in 2009. Initially, he says, Hockey were a Los Angeles-based duo who specialised in “dance, sort of urban, stripped-down, beat-oriented stuff”. They signed a development deal with Epic Records which failed to yield fruitful results, but it didn’t put the pair off a career in music.

“What I like to tell people is that it really had nothing to do with the label, it was just that we didn’t really know who we wanted to be,” he proffers. “We hadn’t figured out our identity. On top of that, we hadn’t figured out how to play a good show night after night. And that had to do with not having a band – just being two people and really feeling like, tethered, and naked.”
So they relocated to Spokane, Washington, where they met drummer Anthony and guitarist Brian, bandmates since their early teens. After fine-tuning their sound, the foursome moved again, to nearby Portland. There, they recorded nine-track mini-album Mind Chaos, a rough sketch of the full-length record (of the same name) due for international release this summer.
In recent months, Hockey have been steadily generating buzz – mostly thanks to their insanely addictive single ‘Too Fake’. Before they’d released a note of music in Europe, people were singing the words back to them at gigs – something Ben finds shocking and funny in equal measures.
“Yeah, we always wonder how we’re really going over with people,” he laughs. “Are we just weirding them out, or…? But it’s exciting to have that sort of reaction when we’ve only really had the MySpace and radio stuff, and with no real record released.”
As Hockey’s primary lyricist, the baby-faced singer reveals that he draws from a well of bookish influences. Though their prickly indie-pop is as far removed from Bob Dylan’s wordy musings as is imaginable, Mr. Zimmerman is something of a heroic figure for them nonetheless.
“We just want to do something real, and interesting, and a little bit left of centre – perhaps a little weird,” says Jerm. “At first, we talked about wanting to write something that sounded more like a speech than the verse of a song – then you’d go to a big melody and the chorus. Kind of pushing the limits of what you can do with a pop song, and still call it a pop song.”
But what do they make of the constant comparisons to LCD Soundsystem?
“We love them, so it could be worse,” Anthony shrugs. “It’s not like they’re saying ‘You sound like Nickelback’, is it?”

‘Too Fake’ is out now on Virgin.