We thought of ourselves as musical terrorists at shows - were weren't biting heads off bats, but we wanted to annoy and confront people.

If you're conscious you must be depressed, or at least cynical.

I was nervous during Radiohead, we thought that they would hate us. I think when we played in LA, one of the dudes from Entourage was in the audience, and that was kinda weird. If anyone would make me nervous it would be David Bowie, Neil Young, someone like that.

We were thinking about how other people deal with this career on every song. We got to meet people like Thom Yorke and hear him say how it's never normal when fans just come up to you. It's always a strange job. We don't want to come off like we're pitying ourselves for having this job because it's really amazing in a lot of ways. But there's a lot of stuff that comes with it that we're not really comfortable with.

It's not like we wanted to get really political in terms of specific causes, but I think a lot of the lyrics deal with paranoia and feeling like "the man" is in control somehow.

Live we're a lot louder and noisier on the album. I think for the album we took a lot of time for the songwriting and we wanted to make good pop music, and I think there's plus and minuses to doing pop music and noise.

We're really into combining lots of different styles into one song: that's normal for us. It might seem arbitrary but we listen to a lot of music that does that.