Parquet Courts: the last great rock band in New York?

They’ve been called as much, but they’re more interested in achieving longevity

Parquet Courts (including Austin Brown, foreground): a band with a pre-internet era outlook. Photograph: Ben Rayner

Thu Sept 03 2015 - 06:00

Several years ago, an up-and-coming indie-rock band from New York called Parquet Courts rolled through the town of Murray, Kentucky, on their first US tour. "It's in an extremely small, weird part of the south, but there's a guy there who runs this record store and he has great taste in music," says guitarist and co-frontman Austin Brown. "We actually played in somebody's kitchen."

As it happens, the gig was even big enough to warrant a story in the local newspaper. The headline? “Band comes to Murray,” Brown says, howling with laughter. “It was so vague but also so fitting for the town. I think they got all of our names wrong and everything. But it was brilliant.”

How things have changed. Parquet Courts – three Texans and a Bostonian, based in New York city – have even had a write-up in Time magazine, when their song Master of My Craft was named fifth best song of 2012. "It was right above Nicki Minaj and right below Taylor Swift, " Brown says. "That was a pretty surreal sandwich to be the filling of."

Then, of course, there was the Rolling Stone headline, which was less than complimentary: "How a bunch of stoned Texas nerds became rock's coolest young band."

‘Pre-internet era’

Tussles with the music press aside, Parquet Courts have been pretty adept at steering a course through the music industry. More impressively, they've managed to do so without a reliance on social media or any major promotion; they're one of the few modern acts not sharing their every thought on Twitter or plugging their new video on Facebook. Their second album, 2012's Light Up Gold, was a breezy combination of post- punk, garage and indie-rock.

Parquet Courts are effectively a contemporary band with a pre-internet era outlook.

“I guess one thing we realised early on is that you don’t have to do everything that’s offered to you,” he says. “You don’t have to do every bit of press, you don’t have to do every photoshoot. We’ve always felt like if our record is truly good and our music is truly worth being shared with people, it will be shared and people will hear it. Our goal was never to be famous, or visible, or be rock stars; it was never to be a public entity. It’s always been about making a new record so we can go on tour, and we’ve done that for the past several years and still been relatively visible without having to check every box on the music industry checklist.”

With three albums under their belts, focus has turned to new material. Most of this year has been spent writing and demoing, as drummer Max Savage finished his degree at NYU and bassist Sean Yeaton became a father in late 2014. While they were busy, Brown and co-frontman and guitarist Andrew Savage released Content Nausea, an album under the Parkay Quarts moniker. Their new material – including forthcoming EP Monastic Living, due in November – will be a full-band affair.

"We were all losing it a little bit from how long we'd been on the road," says Brown of the break from touring. "I think we were all ready to have a break and try to get the juices flowing; to spend some quality time being creative and rediscovering what our band is. About half the material you'll hear on Monastic Living is stuff that I recorded in our practice space on my eight-track tape machine, and the other half is stuff that was done in a studio in Massachusetts. Then we have a bit of material we're compiling for the next record, and we'll go back in October for a couple of weeks and finish the record essentially. We should have another record out hopefully some time next year."

They've also signed a worldwide deal with Rough Trade, which he says "means that I've got more people that I can email about Game of Thrones".

So where does he see the band going in the next five years? “Hmmm . . . hopefully alive, first of all, but you know, all things considered, maybe not,” he says, chuckling. “Everything’s happy over here, everyone’s feeling good. We’ve had some summer vacation time and everyone’s writing a lot. It’s hard to think that far down the road, but there’s no reason that the four of us guys won’t continue to do something and continue to evolve. There’s a few bands that we look up to greatly that have figured out how to exist in changing times and to continue to make great music: bands like Guided By Voices, Sonic Youth, Wilco. They’re rare, but everyone’s interested in figuring out what that means for us: to be a band that is able to exist through different generations.”