Some music obsessives would call chillwave a misnomer.
But, inaccurate labels be damned.
Neon Indians tour for their third record,VEGA INTL.
Credit: Douglas Gorenstein/Getty Images
Then he mentions something decidedly unchill.
And I lost my laptop at the end of that tour, so I had to start from scratch.
But things dont die so easily in the digital age.
It was the only time I had ever done this.
I was able to rip that audio file and start rebuilding the song around it.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Its been four years since your last record.
Theres that industry cliche.
You have your entire life to write the first album and six months to write the second one.
That cliche exists for a reason.
It was this fantastic thing [that] I didnt want to leave hanging.
Honestly, I dont know why I shied away for so long from it.
How would you describe the sound ofVEGA INTL.
The record is more dense than the previous stuff Ive done.
The main limitation was trying to make my hands keep up with the ideas in my head.
It was cool to bring in session players [who were] able to execute some of these ideas.
Its meant to be more of a caricature of that experience than a serious recollection.
I wanted to take the process of making music very serious, but certainly not myself.
At the end of the day I wanted the record to have a little bit of ham and cheese.
Was there a story behind the albums title?It was an amalgam of two names.
I was playing around with theVEGA INTL.part when I was actually going to write a Vega record.
TheNight Schoolcomponent of it felt like its the right phrase to encapsulate the general feel of the album.
It became this running joke in my head about this fictional institution called VEGA INTL.
Scorcese,Airplane, Steely Dan you sound like a media consumer.
What else influenced you?I remember watchingAfter HoursandKing of ComedyatNitehawkin Williamsburg.
That was a key influence in piecing together the thread of this album.
Because you have all these filmmakers that mythologize and exoticize New York City, especially in the 1980s.
Youre a transplant from Texas.
What has your experience been like in New York?Brooklyn has become the city of transplants.
It breeds this temporary insanity.
People who move here, the first six months theyre just kind of this spitting mess.
[laughs] I was totally that guy, and to some extent I still am that guy.
