Parquet Courts songs are riotous affairs, by turns blistering, bubbly and intense, but their albums are nothing … PARQUET COURTS: What’s Your Rupture?, a great NYC label. PARQUET COURTS: Well I’m at home at the moment, but Parquet Courts was on tour since May for the most part. There’s a lot of moments on the record when all of us are singing at the same time and I guess that’s something I kind of associate with hardcore, or Funkadelic. PARQUET COURTS started playing “Be Yourself” by UV Race. PARQUET COURTS started playing “Real Shocks” by Swell Maps. STEREOGUM: I feel like that went without saying. The most important thing he did was see Parquet Courts in a way that we can’t see ourselves. The worst show I have played…. Certain songs like “Violence.” Encouraging us to write more parts to that song to make it more of a song and less of a jam. STEREOGUM started playing “Hanging On The Telephone” by Blondie. There was a movement to make “Roadrunner” the official state song of Massachusetts. PARQUET COURTS: In a sense I might, writing isn’t always easy, and inspiration doesn’t come on demand. STEREOGUM started playing “Magic” by The Cars. What’s it like returning to Texas these days? STEREOGUM started playing “Spanish Bombs” by The Clash. STEREOGUM: I didn’t think it was possible to break those! “They have to learn somehow that life is cruel,” said Andrew. STEREOGUM: Thank god for the dollar menu, eh? Do you ever DJ in NYC? He helped kind of tie a bow around certain song ideas we were wanting to finish but maybe wouldn’t have otherwise. ever? Savage: I think specifically with hardcore, especially '80s hardcore, I think there’s this duality between joy and anger that I find to be really interesting, and that’s something the record kind of deals with at large. PARQUET COURTS: Me too. Hmm… Eartheater – Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin. It starts with Andrew shouting “Almost, almost, almost…” Other tracks are more like the Stranglers, who were not really punk because they could actually play, but who rode the wave so well. STEREOGUM: Of the new songs I heard on NPR “Dear Ramona” particularly stood out. STEREOGUM: Whoa. There were a couple parents in there who were really excited, but the kids didn’t seem to really understand what was going on. We got like four takes, maybe, and after that I was like, "that’s a good starting place, okay let’s try it a few different ways." PARQUET COURTS: Sometimes it happens like that, and sometimes songs just come out of us riffing on whatever PARQUET COURTS: I’m actually credited as that on the first Parquet Courts release, American Specialties. American politics may be reaching a “tipping point”, said Andrew, because “I don’t think that people who are socially conservative can relate to Trump at all. Photo: John Rentoul, 'It was the important that the album ends on a note of optimism'. PARQUET COURTS started playing “(Get a) Grip (On Yourself)” by The Stranglers. STEREOGUM: Taco-ist. I think they expected a deep debate about politics from me but instead they got an embarrassing gush about how much I loved their music and the new album, Wide Awake! STEREOGUM: Just another day in the glamorous life of a rock star? STEREOGUM: You put your albums on cassette, right? “It became very important for us to express where we stand and what we don’t accept as being normal. There was just a little mix up. STEREOGUM: Maybe those three guys were your biggest fans ever? STEREOGUM: Do you ever look up those bands? But it expired and wasn’t re-signed by the second Bush, and the level of mass shootings has gone up and become more and more normal. We were about to go record the record down in Texas when he came to us with the offer to do the record. Perhaps it would be safer to escape into politics. I would support that, our bass player Sean is from Boston. PARQUET COURTS: Yesterday I had tacos the day before I had a burrito. Is that what people consider “putting in dues”? PARQUET COURTS: OK. It’s kind of railing against this idea of cliched, American masculine hyper-individuality. The hard-touring Brooklyn four-piece has developed a reputation for raw, boisterous, and wild shows, although it’s hard to tell who is enjoying them more — the band or the audience. Everyone needs to get something out of it. Our journalists will try to respond by joining the threads when they can to create a true meeting of independent Premium. PARQUET COURTS: A few come to mind immediately, but in my most recent memory, Parquet Courts played in a basement in Kansas City in December, we weren’t even on the flyer for the show, we played for basically three hammered dudes who lived there. We had to do the whole thing in about 20 minutes, which was about the length of these kids’ attention span anyway.”, I wasn’t sure about asking what the song was about. STEREOGUM: Don’t worry, you’ll get your beer tickets. Parquet Courts have made a career as the naturally gifted stoners who can ace the semester from the back of the class. STEREOGUM: That sounds FANTASTIC. PARQUET COURTS: It’s more curious than anything really, because I don’t think about our music in the same way that someone reviewing our music thinks about it. They were pleased to have it from someone old enough to have been there that their music captures the energy and simplicity of early punk. Or do people make you new ones? I don’t know what I expected, but they weren’t it. Turntable Interview: Parquet Courts. Beverly, Mass to be specific. PARQUET COURTS: No I don’t need to look up the Strokes. Brown: I felt like we had covered a lot of ground in a lot of different styles and experiments with our previous records. A bit like The Wall, I said, getting innocent-sounding children to sing bleak, knowing lyrics. Bernie Sanders is a popular candidate for people on both sides of the spectrum.”, They were inspired by the election of Danica Roem, a trans woman, to the legislature in Virginia, “a really conservative state”, last November. PARQUET COURTS: Curious. The band has been on the road for months, but during one of their stopovers in New York, we talked to Austin Brown —one of the quartet’s two vocalists — about his worst show ever, writing songs, and find out where he weighs in on the eternal tacos versus burritos debate. I guess the cover. Savage: I can’t really give him that because we had written the record before he came into the mix. Do you have songs ready, Austin?