'Tis the season when music journalists are asked to write two kinds of story: the stories where they look back over the year in its final days and choose its best artists, releases, and moments, and the stories where they attempt to prognosticate, to pretend it's not completely useless to speculate about what the high points of a given musical year will be.

The fact is, music is a mercurial business, such that even the mighty media conglomerates rarely announce release schedules much in advance of three months. So, when writing a requisite preview of 2005 recently, I kept my dearest musical hope for 2005 under my hat. Music is not a fair business, and for a multitude of reasons the best bands do not always win - but so far I know of only one debut album in 2005 I'll be standing in line for on the morning of its release: the forthcoming full length from The Golden Republic.

I spoke to the Golden Republic's singer and lead guitar player Ben Grimes and bass player Harry Anderson the night after the band's biggest New York show to date, at the storied Bowery Ballroom.

To be fair, the band's backstory is not the stuff of musical legend. The core duo of the band, Ben Grimes and Ryan Shank first played together in 1999. The band went though various changes in line-up and in name over the next four years before settling on the current members under a different name, The People.

"We've gone through about eleven members total over the years, but then just finally found the right thing that settled in to where people weren't quitting and leaving. It's not like we're hard to work with or anything!" Grimes insisted. "Pretty much everything except myself the lead singer and the drummer, Ryan, has been an endless cast of people."

I asked how such a relatively young band had managed to sign with one of the best indie labels in the country, Astralwerks. Ben explained: "It came about because of our illustrious manager. He just knew the right people and actually before he technically started managing us, he played some of our stuff to the label and they loved it.

"And we were all like "seriously? You love this? Like, that much?" His self-deprecation is charming, as is his laugh. He continues, "...and we've just kind of been talking ever since that. Then after - God, it's been -it seems like it's been years since we started talking to them - I suppose maybe it has, I don't know. But after a long time of trying to figure out how we were going to do everything, we finally got it all worked out and signed up."