Violent Soho Pine for Their Australian Homeland

Violent Soho are homesick. The Australian grunge rockers have been touring the US since 2009, using an apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y. as their home base. "The first couple of months were pretty exciting," singer/guitarist Luke Boerdam tells Spinner. "But then we started to miss a few of the subtleties like, um ..." Not being in a van or apartment with a bunch of blokes day after day, night after night? "Yeah," the 24-year-old says, laughing. "Exactly. We miss things like family. There's something about home."

This turn of events has given Violent Soho's self-titled debut album a huge slap of irony. The record, which was released on Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label last winter, is a punchy rock set that bristles with dissatisfaction and suburban alienation, clearly triggered by their hometown surroundings in Mansfield, near Brisbane. "The whole album is about hating the boredom and mundanity of suburban living," Boerdam confirms. "Before doing this, I never believed in the idea of home, being in one special place called home. But now after being in America for 10 months, I really miss it. I never thought I would. Now I'm like 'I really want to go home.'"

That's not likely to happen anytime soon, at least not for very long. The band gets one week off to visit their homeland over the summer, but won't be based back there until the end of the year, when the quartet, which also numbers guitarist James Tidswell, bassist Luke Henery and drummer Michael Richards, starts work on its second record. So, will the inspiration for disc number two result in a doleful sentimental set of ballads about how much they miss home?

"I guess it will be," deadpans Boerdam. "No, that would freak people out. It's interesting, though. I never thought about how the album comes from suburbanism, from Mansfield, from where we grew up. Now we have a love-hate relationship with the place I guess --love it for some things and hate it for others."