Matt and Kim’s spunky brand of synth pop has seen the duo’s profile expand from being a fun live act to having their music licensed and featured in many different outlets. Now a steady festival touring act, the duo decided to do something they’ve never done before: record an EP in less than a week. The result was We Were the Weirdos, which also happened to be the band’s least stressful effort. However, what made the timeline so tight was that it took place in the week between desert dates.

“Coachella was a great and stressful occasion,” Matt Johnson says of the whirlwind period. “It was nice to have no concern about how it would be accepted.”

Ahead of the band’s current tour, we caught up with Johnson to hear about the chaos of making and releasing in album in such a short period, and why it ended up being a good thing for them.

Why was the time in between Coachella so chaotic? 

I think it was a couple of things. There was a lot more pressure from that festival than any other one as far as from a point of view like time management and things like that. You don’t want to fuck it up, and Kim and I love fucking shit up. Making mistakes is half of our show. There’s a lot of pressure to not mess things up too bad.

How were you able to write, record and overall hammer out an EP so fast?

I think when you think of a deadline, my mom, who wrote for newspapers for years and years, she always told me that a deadline is the best inspiration and that things will take you exactly how long you need to do them. If you have forever to do them, it will take you forever to do it. That’s my experience for anything, basically. I can’t ever say anything is done until it’s handed in. Until the deadline has passed, I’m stressed out. That’s when I know it’s done. So, to combine a deadline inspiration with actual inspiration of having taken a break and coming back to playing again, we were excited to make songs. We started writing songs the week before the first Coachella date.

So you were ahead of the game a little.

We just finished a tour in the UK and were like “Let’s make some music.” We were feeling inspired and wanted to act. I don’t think we knew we were actually going to attempt to finish it or make the recording between the two weekends. We played weekend one and it threw more gas on the fire to do this now. We got our buddy Lars who recorded most of our last album, and also our very first album. We went to the studio and just grinded it and rolled with it. We didn’t over think it. I overthink everything or I’ll take a long time because I’m mostly overthinking things. I remember our last album we had a song called “Stir It Up,” which we went through something like 33 revisions. I think 32 revisions were pretty unnecessary (laughs) and the fact that i had the time to do them is something. 

Since a deadline, in this situation, served as your best friend, would you ever do it again? 

I think so especially given the response we got with the songs. They were just more raw and more real. The rough edges weren’t taken off. There are things I hear that if I had time I would have changed. Maybe that would have actually been worse for the songs. This was the only way for me to find that out was to just get it done. Like I said, the way people connect to it and the fact that I haven’t beaten my head against the wall. Every time we finish an album, I love writing music, but I’m just like “I don’t know if I can ever do that again.” It was so stressful, and I have bad anxiety anyways, and anxiety feeds upon itself.

But it was a good anxiety though? 

This was the thing. I didn’t have enough time to let it get really bad. Usually it’s like having too much rope to hang yourself with. That’s usually how I roll. The problem usually is having too much time to keep stressing and overthinking things. So this was good and actually reduced anxiety. Well, there were a couple points where it had to be handed in at noon and it’s like the final master was getting done and we were five minutes and I was calling our manager. I was worried that five minutes would bust this whole plan up, but it ended up being okay. There’s something to be said that these might be our best songs that we’ve ever made. I don’t know, but I kind of feel like that right now.