The Naked and Famous: ready to reconnect

You’ve heard New Zealand indie dance-pop quintet the Naked and Famous, even if you don’t know the group by name. Its first single, “Young Blood,” has turned up in absolutely everything since its arrival in 2010 — movies, TV shows, video games, commercials. And even after all this time, it generates not weariness but an “Oh, it’s that song!” kind of reaction.

The Naked and Famous has gone to put out two more records, both of which are chockablock with catchy lyrics and infectiously danceable melodies. Its newest release, Simple Forms, arrived last month via Somewhat Damaged, so I called bassist David Beadle to talk about the record and about the band’s inescapable presence in pop culture — and about the much-discussed romantic breakup of the band’s primary songwriters, Alisa Xayalith and Thom Powers.

The Pitch: There was a long break after your last album. How do you get yourselves back in the habit of recording again?

David Beadle: With Rolling Waves, we were all living in the same house and everything, so that was sort of written in that way: We would just wake up, and ideas would come from one bedroom down to the next one. After that, we got on the road again for quite a while, and it was during that time that we were ready to sort of go and live on our own when we got back. During that touring, that breakup occurred, and it affected all of us.

By the time we got back, we were all sort of ready to wake up and not see each other each morning, and just take some time off. That took about a year and a half. We were still in communication, but nothing like that tight-knit family that we once were.

The writing sort of began on Thom’s end, and we’d have demos popping up in our shared Dropbox folder. Eventually, we were like, “This stuff’s awesome. This is great!” We’d always had so much fun doing it, it seemed silly to throw all that away, so we eventually started to come back together and found a rehearsal space to start fine-tuning these demos — and reconnecting with each other and the music we were writing, as well.

How does the process change when you’re not working together but instead coming together from all over with these separate ideas?

Not a lot, actually. Our writing process had always been very much Thom and Alisa on an acoustic guitar, coming up with a vocal hook or something like that, then all of us coming into the room and producing it, in a way — writing it together and figuring out how it sounds as a band. That part didn’t change so much, because we’re always on the internet and everything. Rather than being in the same house and yelling out, “Hey, can you come down here?” we just had a lot more privacy. We could come to these ideas at our own leisure, so it gave us a little more space to work on things this time around.

What’s always been interesting about the Naked and Famous is the way your music finds its way into other things. How did that initially come about with “Young Blood” and its seeming omnipresence?

We’re not actually sure, either. [laughs] I think we’re very lucky. There’s, like, a snowboarding video, and we had “Young Blood” and “No Way” synched to that very early on. It was very much, “Oh, our music’s not just for someone who wants to listen to a song — it’s giving them some sort of visual cue as well.” There’s a cinematic quality to some of the production that Thom and Aaron [Short, keyboards] do, and that may be why.

Is it a different experience, hearing your music in a film or on television, as opposed to just hearing it on the radio?

I always get excited when I hear it. I think some people get embarrassed, but if our song comes on the radio, I’m sure to turn it up and start smiling and clapping and stuff. [laughs] But hearing one of our songs in a video or a commercial of some sort — that’s always exciting to me because that’s someone’s visual representation of what that song meant to them. It’s cool to hear the song in a different way, accompanied by something visual like that.

What use of your music have you been most surprised by?

In Norway, they eat this puréed fish … stuff. Our track was synched to a commercial for that, which was quite cool. There was also another one: Carrie? That one where the blood falls down at the end? “Young Blood” was in that scene. That was like, “Wow. What?” That was an interesting one. •

The Naked and Famous

With XYLØ and The Chain Gang of 1974

Friday, November 4, at Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland