Silversun Pickups Bring ‘Tenterhooks’ Down Under in a Long‑Overdue Australian Comeback

GRAMMY® Award-nominated Los Angeles quartet Silversun Pickups are returning to Australia and New Zealand for the first time in fourteen years. The acclaimed rockers will be belting out tracks from their brand new album Tenterhooks along with fan favourites from their timeless discography. Known for their emotionally charged alt-rock anthems, the band’s rich catalogue continues to resonate with generations of fans, from huge single Lazy Eye and Gold-certified Panic Switch to acclaimed albums including Carnavas (2006), Swoon (2009) and Neck of the Woods (2012).

Released in February, the band unveiled their seventh studio album Tenterhooks. An unapologetic ten-track collection featuring singles The Wreckage, New Wave and Long Gone, Tenterhooks captures Silversun Pickups at their most electrifying.

Thriving as one of the most consistent and quietly impactful alt-rock bands of this century, Silversun Pickups remain an absolute force. Breaking through in 2006 with Carnavas, the album reached certified Gold before stand-out single Lazy Eye achieved Platinum-certified success. Off the back of their 2009 release Swoon, the band earned themselves a GRAMMY® nomination for Best New Artist in 2010 before climbing the Billboard charts, reaching No. 1 for single Panic Switch. Brian Aubert talsk to Rob Lyon about the tour.

Fourteen years between drinks is a long time. You must be looking forward to getting back to Australia?
Yes, I am looking forward to going to Australia. Fourteen years is a long time.It doesn’t seem like fourteen years, and COVID really messed with that, but it has been fourteen years, which is crazy.

I still remember the last time you were in Adelaide with the Birds of Tokyo at the old Heaven nightclub which does not exist any more.
Oh my god, that was a really great spot. I’m so glad we got to play there.

It just seems like so much has happened in that time?
That’s the thing, like, it doesn’t seem that long ago to me, but if I think about everything that’s happened in life, it’s like a whole lifetime ago.

Is it just as much about getting reacquainted with Aussie fans this time?
We’ve always been searching and looking at ways to come back. The first time we went there, we just thought, okay, well, let’s just look at everything we can, hug every koala we can, climb every bridge we can, eat every like bug that we can, do everything we can, because we’ll never be able to come back here again. How can music bring us to this beautiful country? And then we came back again with Birds of Tokyo, and then we came back again with Danny Warhol’s on a festival run. Australia has been a current thing in our world, more current than a lot of international stuff, and even though we’ve been to other places more, it just feels important to us. For just no other reason than just, like, logistics and this and that, somehow things didn’t really work itself out, and other thing happen, and then things got a little harder, touring, all this sort of boring stuff. But then we got presented with this, and it was perfect. Perfect timing, perfect everything, and we were thrilled. When we got presented it, we were just, like, thrilled.

Does it just feel like all the planets have just lined up at the right time?
Yes! Yes! We have our friends, Eliza and the Delusional and there’s a bunch of people that we know asking when do you think you guys will come back here? We were trying, we were trying, and then something landed, and it landed in a way that was more perfect than we could have ever imagined, so coming back there is just a thrill. It’s really wild.

Also touring with the new album, Tenterhooks. I love that album. It’s fantastic. It must be a really good feeling to go on tour with a brand new album.
Oh, that’s very nice of you. It’s very fresh to us, we’ve done a lot of touring, but we haven’t done too much of our own, because we’re doing these Weezer and Shins tour dates, which is going to take two months of our time, and then after that is when we were going to really do heavy touring for this record. But when we’re in Australia, we’re just wondering how we’re going to approach the set because it has been quite a while that we’ve been there, and we might make it a little bit more of a general Silversun world kind of show. We’re not sure yet.

Maybe it might be easier to play for four hours and just play everything!
Dude, careful what you wish for! We’ve only got twenty five5 minutes for the Weezer show, which, for us, could basically be two songs. We’re still trying to figure out how to make that work. People keep saying, ‘I can’t wait to see you at Weezer,’ and I’m like, well, you’d better get there early because we’ll be on and gone before you know it.

Having a couple of months with the new album Tenterhooks, when you reflect on it now, what does it mean to you when you look back on it or see the vinyl on your mantle?
We’re very proud of it because what we wanted it to be, it really became that. We really were looking at making a record that was very antsy, and just didn’t want to stay around very long. I wanted to get in and get out, which is very different for how we do things. So I remember saying everything that’s coming out of me right now sits in a world that I just want, like, a ten‑song one vinyl, flip it over album that is just in a hurry, and has no patience. It’s like, it’s just absolutely impatient and that’s just how it felt, and still feels in the world, you know pissy! Pissed off!

Do you feel the pressure with each album or is that just the pressure that you put on yourselves?
We put on ourselves to make sure that if we walk away feeling like we didn’t try. If that ever happened, we’d be disappointed. Other than that, it’s the only thing we can control with all of this is what we want to do, and how we want to make it. So we just got to let none of that has to enter our brain. We can’t, you know? We can’t let any of that in. We just got to do what we’re doing, and then we have to kind of answer for it later.

I was reading somewhere else that you were feeling really inspired, particularly writing the songs and things like that. Did you find that the songs actually came quite easily?
Oh yeah, yep. It was another one of those situations where we went to Butch’s house, much vague, and I got the band together if I had enough ideas that were running around my head, and there was more than five of them, and they weren’t leaving, that’s the time to start something and we don’t even know if we’re starting a record, but call up Butch, get the band together, and go, let’s go right over to your house, and let’s just start hearing what’s coming out of my head, and I’ll bring an acoustic guitar, and then we start. We’re not quite sure what going to end up being, but we were recording our record to a point where management and people who we work with didn’t even really know what we’re doing. They said, well, when do you guys want to do stuff? We’re like, oh, sorry, yeah, we have, like, three songs done, we’re like making a record. They’re like, what? I was like, yeah, sorry, we just started and Butch has time before he goes out with Garbage, so we might do as much as we can now, and then come back to it later. It just felt like that.

What is it about Butch Vig and what he brings to the table? That’s three albums now with him, he just seems to be such an influential guy?
He’s somebody that I’m quite close to now. He’s a really good friend, I know his family really well. We talk a lot. We have a really great working relationship together. We really enjoy working on things. When we’re not doing Silversun stuff, if I have to do other projects and things… like, there’s a band, a great Australian band called Eliza and the Delusionals that we know really well, and I sang on one of their songs. It’s just one of those things, I’ll call him and go, hey man, I need to sing on a song, you want to do it? He goes, yeah! I just go to his house, and we just enjoy it, you know! He is a guy that is still enjoying being creative, and making things, and he’s the person that’s just not sitting on the fact that he did a lot of insane things. He doesn’t sit there and go, I did it, so let’s just do the way I do it. He wants to get lost and have adventures in music, and that’s a very inspiring thing to watch.All the experience that he has had, just makes it even cooler…and he’s a Wisconsin guy. If you know anything about United States, Wisconsin people are just cool, chill, like, no ego, like, just really great people.

Could you imagine working with anyone else but Butch?
That’s so hard. It’s tough, I don’t want to. I find really conducive for me to be as creative as I can. He’s just someone who brings out the most creativity in me in a way that isn’t painful. It’s very pleasurable, he’s a gem. It’s rare to work with someone who’s in a massive, still‑relevant and current band. Garbage are honestly more relevant than ever; Shirley Manson is someone the world has finally caught up with. She’s an important figure, so Butch comes at recording from a band perspective too, and I love that

Approaching Tenterhooks, was the vision clear in terms of what you wanted to do with it, or did it sort of unfold as you started getting a couple of songs down in terms of, okay, well, we’ve got something here?
It always unfolds in some ways, you got to let that happen. We have to start with these ideas, just to get the first brick down. Then if it wavers and changes, that’s good. You got to listen to what the album is doing. This record, I pretty right on the line. Once we start, and again recording with Butch, the last couple records we’ve made with him have been like, we start this train going, and then we just have to jump in front of this train and just start throwing the tracks down, because it’s moving. It’s moving, and it’s moving. So we move really quickly and stuff, so it’s making sure you don’t get lost and this time in particular Christopher, our drummer, had one of Butch Vig’s electronic kits that he was given by Roland, these really crazy kits that actually feel very real. He had that in the room in the house, too, so it’s like he could be playing all the time while we were writing, and be part of the process, instead of just learning drum parts and then recording them. He was in there and working on stuff and trying stuff out while we were trying stuff. So while I was doing takes, or while we were doing stuff, he could hear them and have headphones on and be creating his own world, so it was really just this crazy idea factory. If you fell asleep for a second, you get lost. I have a tendency to, when Nikki, my bass player, when she does bass takes, that means usually that I’m not doing anything… I’ll always lie down on the couch, and for some reason, it knocks me out every time. I fall asleep every single time and then I wake up, and I go, wait, what’s going, where are we? What happening? Because some things have changed so fast.

Does it work the other way around, that you’re taking a lot away from these younger bands that you tour with?
One thousand percent! We try to make it pretty clear right away when bands come and join us on tour that this is their party, this is their tour, there’s no red velvet ropes, there’s no rooms you can’t go into, we don’t want to host them all the time, so it’s like, just take what you want. But I don’t want to be like, do you need this? You need this? It’s all yours, this is your party and then understand that we’re a band… you’re a band, so we’re peers. Having that kind of relationship, having that access to bands that are coming from a different generational place and younger spirit is just a real luxury for us, because I don’t think a lot of people get that opportunity, but the fact that we can meet each other in this levelled playing field, because we have respect for them, and they have respect for us, pay attention to what they’re doing, I love it. Some of the younger bands we’ve taken out over the last couple of years have been really aggressive and really loud, and getting back into that space has tuned my ears again to how beautiful aggressive music can be. It definitely played a huge role in the ferocity of our album.

Any plans to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Carnavas or is it very much keep looking forward?
Doesn’t matter! Just a number! We don’t really get wrapped up in nostalgia, because for us it all feels like one big, gelatinous thing, a continuous line rather than separate eras. But we’re aware, through other people, of how long they’ve lived with these songs and how much the record has meant to them, which is why we’re doing a Carnavas tour. We don’t care how old it is twenty years, twenty one, whatever, the priority now is getting the chance to play these songs for people who never heard them back in the day. That’s going to be fun. It’s also kind of hilarious to realise we’ve technically gotten better than some of those songs, and yet we’re still getting smacked in the face by them every night.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Silversun Pickups on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…