Grimes has some very decisive opinions about modern music. I asked him about the comparisons that he thinks will be inevitable when the full length is released, and he surprised me: "We get T-Rex a lot, which I understand because I definitely lean in that direction, and... I'm not really sure. The full length is pretty all over the map. At any given point, you've got you could say that we sound like T-Rex or Tom Petty or any number of things. There are a lot of 70's influences, 80's influences, folk influences, country influences, - there's a lot of stuff we like to digest and make a vital part of what we're doing."

"So it's a big blender?" I ask. T Rex was about the last reference I expected to hear, much less Tom Petty. Although, now that he's mentioned them, there are hints of both, to me their influences seem to me to be much more contemporary - shades of Interpol and Franz Ferdinand, mixed into a further evolution of the disco punk sound pioneered by the Gang of Four.

"It is a big blender," Grimes agrees. "We try to keep it that way. There's so many bands that right now are kind of grabbing onto one band from the 60's or 70's and being like 'okay, we're going to sound like the Cars,' and just make an entire record that just sounds like a Cars record, and I just don't even see the point. They're selling records, they're doing well, and people are grabbing onto that, but especially just from a songwriters point of view I hate it. I hate the idea of doing that. There's so much more out there to take from."

Harry adds, "We like to mix it up."

Justified or not, the similarity to the Interpol sound is bound to come up again; the Golden Republic's full length was produced by Interpol producer Peter Katis. I asked the band members what they thought Katis' biggest contribution to the disc was.

Harry began "A lot of it was stuff that we came up with, he kind of glued it together in a way ..." Ben elaborated "He brought an element of maturity to our songs that I think wasn't there when we got to the studio, and he has a really good ear for little parts and little hooks that you would almost kind of breeze over. He's like 'this is a great thing, and this is a great thing, we need to bring that up.' He made us think more about what we were doing with our songs, and kind of made us grow up a lot as a band, which I think that's the greatest accomplishment that we had from our time in the studio, we just grew up a whole hell of a lot."