Ten years of perfecting rocking crescendos should have prepared Austin, Texas' Explosions in the Sky to take the stage before their musical heroes. Not so, drummer Chris Hrasky tells Spinner. The four-piece, who kick off a short tour with the Flaming Lips August 23, are admittedly nerve-wracked. "They're really hard workers," Hrasky says. "They're still the type of band who's loading their own gear when they clearly don't need to be. They're huge. We're really excited to play with them, but we're also nervous. It's pressure. Playing in front of a band like that we go, 'Oh, I hope the Flaming Lips like us.' But it will be fun."

Perhaps stakes are high due to the Lips far-reaching impact on Explosions. "When we first formed the band in '99, 'The Soft Bulletin' was the record that the four of us were obsessed with for a couple of years," Hrasky says. "That's still one of our favorite records of all time, so being able to tour with them is definitely a high point for us. The Flaming Lips aren't particularly similar to Explosions, but they're a band we feel in a lot of ways is a pretty big influence."

Specifically, Hrasky admires the Lips' ability to straddle commercial success and artistic freedom. "It's a very catchy and accessible record, but at the same time it's really weird," Hrasky says of 'Bulletin.' "Somehow it appealed to a lot of people and that's not easy to do, to kind of experiment with something but have it succeed in such a way that a lot of people respond to it. Very few bands can do that, and that's something we aspire to. We don't ever want to make music that's just for this segment of an audience. We want to make music for everybody, whether it's a 13-year-old emo kid or the most jaded 30-year-old Pitchfork guy."

As evidenced by the ear-crushing performance Explosions unleashed at Houston's Free Press Summerfest last Saturday, Explosions have no problem appealing to a mixed audience. The 90-minute set was their most bracing yet, plucking song transitions off their most recent album, 'All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone,' that were fueled by reverb, echo and Hrasky's rat-tat-tat drumbeats.

Next up for Explosions is crafting songs for their new album and performing at All Tomorrow's Parties' 10th anniversary in Minehead, England on December 11-13. "We hope that we can kind of get lost in it while we're playing and the hope is that the audience does too," Hrasky says. "Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. You know, it just depends on the night."