Girls Will Be Boys

“The froth is ice, like, the head is ice.” Chet ‘JR’ White is marvelling at the frozen crest on the pint of cider he’s just been served in an Edinburgh pub. Walking through the Grassmarket, White and fellow San Francisco resident Christopher Owens had claimed that they didn’t find the Scottish autumn too cold; I suspect the choice of frosty cider is now their way of proving it.

Owens and White are the two founding, permanent members of Girls, whose debut album, offhandedly titled Album, has launched them from their apartment-cum-studio to a European tour in matter of months. But in contrast to the vanguard of experimental rock emanating from the opposite coast of America, Girls revel in simplicity: vintage '50s and '60s pop tropes rub up against direct, heartfelt lyricism throughout this collection of starkly separate songs. And then there’s the non-descriptive naming practice. White, a droll character whose greying temples confirm that Girls are no fresh-faced newbies, recalls the reasoning: “What should we call the band? Girls. Oh awesome. And then we were like, what should we call the album? We came up with some names but didn’t like any of them. And one day Chris had like a mock-up of the album and inside were photos of different girls that are our friends. It was like a photo album, so we thought we’d call it Album.”

Owens, wearing a chequered baseball cap over his long sandy hair, spends the first ten minutes of the interview picking at his dark nail varnish and looking downward, until asked about the recording of Album. “We didn’t take time off work,” he says in a voice raw from nightly shows. “We just started to record songs one at a time, then we’d stop and we’d go on a tour or something, or just not record for a month. It did take like a year to record but not that much actual time. It was easy, we didn’t have a deadline. It was picked up by a really small label, a friend of ours who said he’d put it out, so we didn’t feel any rush.”

They may not be driven by any career-plotting ambition, but what has set Girls apart from the clogged highway of garage rock bands is the hazy melancholia that envelopes the cracked vocals. Album is overflowing with gnarled emotion, Owens variously singing about a missing father, an ex-girlfriend, serial heartache or just everyday ennui. “I think that’s just how life is,” Owens explains. “Just when you think things are going well, that’s when something crazy happens... The music itself is kind of medicinal for me. But yeah, I think there’s sadness because when you think about it life is really sad, for anybody. For other people more than me probably.”

But Owens’ background surely gives him licence for a little introspection. Raised in the infamous Children of God cult, he lived an unthinkably sheltered childhood before escaping at the age of 16 to live with his sister. “I don’t really care talking about it,” he warns. “I think some people care more about that story than the music and I think that’s silly. I think if you’re trying to figure out the music and you want to know someone’s history I think it’s relevant but I don’t wanna become some kind of sensational story.”

While he may be reluctant to indulge in Oprah-style couch psychology, Owens is willing to accept the influence his upbringing has had on the music: “I was singing every day with whole groups of people. It was like the one time where we’d be free from all the little things that were just weird, and like, rules and chores. Singing was something happy and fun we did together and I think that made an impact on me. It was like spiritual, religious music.”

Appropriately, the formation of Girls came about through mutual female friends, as White recalls: “I’d been hanging out with this group of really artistic, crazy girls who were just all friends. They met Chris and we became part of this group of maybe six or seven people and started hanging out.” Despite the fact that both Owens and White were playing in various Californian punk bands during this time, they didn’t write or play together until 2006. By then disillusioned with the punk scene, White was attracted to the stylistic freedom that Girls offered: “I went into making this record not feeling bound by any genre or anything, and we could follow whatever instinct we had.”

Such was the bond between the duo that they soon moved in together, quite literally. “There was just a wall between our rooms and French doors behind it,” White says. “We broke it down so we could just open up our rooms. So we ended up basically living in the same room for a year.”

As Cyndi Lauper once observed, girls just wanna have fun, and Girls are no exception. But they have already been caught off guard by the media interest in their lifestyle. “This story came out where we took ecstasy,” White says. “We spent three days with an interviewer and we just assumed, being naive and stupid, that it would be cool to just do it in front of him. And then it came out in this article, like very graphic, like how I took it and how Chris took it, it was very sensationalised.” White says that his parents were “really rational about it” when they read the interview. They’ll be pleased to know there were no substances taken on this occasion. Except cold cider, and that’s nothing to write home about.