Has your success this year meant that there have been people who have discovered, say, the Field Mice through hearing your music?
"That's exactly what's been happening, which is incredibly flattering; kids telling us that they're really into Rocketship because we talked about how much we love them. Like, when we were in Birmingham, England, this kid who was literally like 14 years old told me he was really into the Field Mice.

I'm like: 'How could you possibly love the Field Mice? I'm too young to love the Field Mice, and you're 14!' But he'd gotten into them because of us. That's like the coolest thing in the world to think about, that people could be finding out about these bands that, in our view, are underappreciated, and under-represented historically, and getting into them years after the fact, because of us. I don't know if that counts as a good deed, but I'm grateful that people are looking beyond us and discovering the bands that are inspirational to us."

Are you old enough to have felt the stigma of liking twee records back in the day?
"I feel like this kind of music was so irrelevant in America that no one even knew enough to hate it. In England people get into really strong personal identity wars about being indie-pop, or new-romantic. Those words like indie and twee have cultural resonance there that they don't here; in America all that stuff is too far under the radar to be felt in any way. When I was in high-school, maybe people had heard of Belle and Sebastian, but that was about it.

I do remember my friends who were all into hardcore teasing me for listen to Hefner. But I certainly never got beat up for liking them."

So were you some snivelling twee-pop nerd?
"No, I was just into traditional indie-rock in general. Pavement and Yo La Tengo are two of my favorite bands. Guided By Voices I love. Matador Records in the '90s was just amazing, with Helium, and early Cat Power. I'm not exclusively about this weird niche of jangly guitars and fey little boys. I like Modest Mouse, y'know. I grew up listening to Nirvana and Sonic Youth and Smashing Pumpkins. I'm very diverse in my appreciation of music made by white people in the suburbs."

You seemed to tip your hat to your love of Nirvana with the song "Kurt Cobain's Cardigan."
"Well, I love Nirvana; you listen to them now and they're still better than most stuff around, just this really awesome, abrasive guitar band. Nirvana was that first band that got me and my friends aware of alternative music. From there, local pop-punk was a big part of what we listened to in high-school, just local bands at the YWCA or community center. At that time, 'emo' meant something different, and that's what I was into: these melodic post-hardcore bands, the poppier side of hardcore. Bands like the Promise Ring and Braid and Get-Up Kids in the late-'90s. It wasn’t until I went off to college that I discovered traditional indie-pop like K Records. Before that, I'd only known Beat Happening and The Vaselines through Kurt Cobain's appreciation of that kind of stuff. It wasn't until I was older that I learned about the community that surrounded those albums, the scenes that they came from. It helped that I went to a school in the Pacific Northwest, where labels like K and Kill Rock Stars are so important. It was really educational to see a lot of that music first-hand. Once the internet took over in the late-'90s, you could really go crazy researching that stuff as much as you wanted. I didn’t have a cool older brother or older sister, I had the internet."

When did you first start making any kind of music?
"We had a pop-punk band in a basement in Philadelphia when I was 14. I'd always plated guitar, for as long as I could remember, and played in various bands throughout the years. In college, I was in an indie-pop band, and a garage-punk band. That's why it’s so amazing that people are into this band that I'm in now, because I've played music with friends in so many different bands, and literally none of them anybody ever cared about; I'd never been in a band that’d played outside of its own telephone area code."

So this band were conceived with the same lack of ambition?
"It was never a lack of ambition. I always thought everything I was doing was massively important at the moment, it's just that nothing ever really happened. I don’t know what the difference with the Pains is. It felt the same: start a band, play some shows, maybe try to record a seven-inch. The fact that I'd done this so many times and no one’s cared means that I really appreciate it now. If I was 21 and I'd started a band and all of a sudden we were touring the world, I'd probably be a total dick. But, luckily I realise how rare what's happening to us happens to someone. It's pretty random."

When did you get a sense that good things were going to happen this time?
"At the start of last year, I looked at a calendar, and thought: 'oh my god, are we a real band now?' We were going to England, then go around America, then to SXSW. I suddenly realized that people were interested in this. People besides myself! I’ve always been a really big fan of our band, it’s just weird to think other people would share that enthusiasm."

Are you at work on the next record, now?
"Yeah, we're rehearsing the songs right now. Every day. We've been rehearsing and writing, and hopefully we’ll start tracking it in the spring, after we're done with all this touring."