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The Postelles Go Indie with New Album

After a few setbacks and a scrapped major label deal, rising New York garage rock band The Postelles released their self-titled debut album today via +1 Records. After having released an EP, White Night, via Capitol Records, frontman David Balk sarcastically observes the contrast to finally releasing their album under an independent label.

“Yeah, it’s on an indie label, but I mean we have publicists and the whole team,” Balk says. “It’s not like I’m selling them [albums] out of the back of a van or anything.” The album was unofficially released under Capitol last year, but was never available to the public. Now, re-mastered and with the addition of new songs, the album includes 13 songs, all delightfully catchy complemented by gritty guitar riffs and angst-y lyrics.

While discussing the addition of new songs, Balk comments on “Sound the Alarms,” admitting, “it was just a song that we sort of had and wanted to do in the studio and do just for fun. And we ended up being like, ‘this would fit perfect on the album’, it’s sort of an in-your-face catchy song.” Having waited so long to officially release an album, the band has had a lot of time to create new songs in the studio. “Because it’s been so long, we’re actually recording new songs for hopefully another upcoming release really soon.”

The Postelles have consistently been compared to The Strokes, but their various influences stretch outside the indie genre. Balk comments on some of their classic-rock influences, “Our favorite bands ever are The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and all these bands that sort of…they groove, you know. These 21, 22 year olds playing that sort of garage rock, catchy…Because that sort of explains what you’re going through at the time, and you know you definitely want to grow and eventually get to that phase where you’re doing like, “Let It Be.”

The four members of the Postelles met in high school in Manhatten and quickly started playing festivals and shows. Balk laughs about the typical skepticism he faced.

“When we first started we were definitely way younger, and everyone at the festivals and at the shows,” he says. “And every time we had an interview or anything, they’d all say, ‘you’re not even allowed to drink here, what are you doing? You’re young.’”

Now, The Postelles have played many different festivals and Balk explains those experiences have brought a different energy to the band. “Any band, it doesn’t matter, you could be a headliner, you could be the first band of the day—there are going to be plenty of people who have never heard you before. It’s just what a festival does. And that can be really, really amazing, but it can also be really, really strange.”

For now Balk notes that they may be pulling back a bit from the festival scene. “We love them, but we don’t want to do any huge festivals just yet this summer because we’ve done them a lot,” he says. “And we seem to feel that it would be cool to just build on our own fan base as the album’s coming out, instead of, as we were talking about before, the festivals, you know, you play for all these new people and everything’s just great, but we’ve never really been given the chance to really play for our own fans and do headlining stuff.”

With some tour dates coming up in June and July, and their album album finally available to the public, their fan base is sure to expand.