From playing around to playing on stage, this rising indie band does it right.

Adam Granduciel has prospered from his own boredom.
He first began playing guitar as an ennui-soaked West Coast teenager stuck in his room with nothing to do. And he’s spent much of the past seven years playing around in Philadelphia with his home digital recorder: “you just hook a bunch of pedals up to it and you can do whatever.”
Check out our video interview with Adam Granduciel, leader of War on Drugs, and watch some concert footage.By smashing recordings together, he created the rough-hewn but ethereal sound that would permeate his recordings in the band The War On Drugs. Even the band’s name—which suffers from an inability to be Googleable—arose from a late-night session of joking around with friends and a dictionary.

The War On Drugs will release its much-buzzed-about debut album, Wagonwheel Blues, on June 17 on the independent label Secretly Canadian. It took Granduciel and the rest of the group—guitarist Kurt Vile and a rotating cast of supporting musicians—around six months to complete the release once they were signed to the label.

Much of the material was recorded at Granduciel’s house, where the band made it a point not to let looming deadlines get in the way of keeping the music as loose and “really free” as possible—an effort that pays off on album highlight “A Needle In Your Eye”.

“We were trying this one version for so long, then I had this old sample,” Granduciel says of a rough mix of a second version of the song. “I dumped it in and then put organs and harmonica on it. It was a culmination of the three versions, and it just made sense.”

Granduciel’s friends (and now label mates) indie-popsters Windsor for the Derby gave an early collection of the group’s demos to Secretly Canadian—an act that initially didn’t please Granduciel. “I was like ‘oh, don’t do that,’ but then (the label) e-mailed, so I kept sending them tapes.”

The band was eventually signed and released the demos as the free, online-only EP Barrel of Batteries.
Listen to three of the songs from their EP Barrel of Batteries, and download the entire album for free.It quickly caught the attention of tastemakers, like The Fader (they called the newest album “a totally serious album, shimmering and sprawling”) and Stereogum, and earned the group early comparisons to everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Brian Eno. Granduciel himself cops to a “Boss phase,” and a penchant for ambient sounds.
Nationwide distribution has helped get their sound out and allowed the group to gig across the country. Granduciel’s years of screwing around have helped hone a loose live show that’s anything but boring.

And that live show is the product of honest energy and excitement on the band’s part. As Granduciel says, “it’s kind of hard to fake it.”
In our interactive feature, hear what Granduciel has to say about the five albums that play most in the car stereo while traveling across the country to the band’s various gigs.