We Are Scientists

As one half of We Are Scientists (with Chris Cain), Murray believes he's at his creative best when he's not too concerned with being sentimental about the past or precious about his work. Onward and upward, you might say.

The results can be heard on We Are Scientists' ninth studio album, Qualifying Miles, an LP steeped in nostalgia with a focus on a live feel. Murray recently sat down with us to explain where he's at with the 20th anniversary of With Love and Squalor and how their friendship is the foundation for every good thing.

Analogue: I wanted to ask about perspective. With Love and Squalor turns 20 this year, and the early EPs go even further back. That’s a long run. Has there been any sort of celebration or reflection on that milestone?

Keith Murray: Things like that honestly don’t occur to us. We’re pretty bad at tracking those kinds of demarcations. Fortunately, our management and label are very good at reminding us. Every time one of those anniversaries rolls around, we’ll get a call asking if we want to reissue the record or play a show around it.

We’re usually hesitant because we’re forward-looking. We’re always writing and working on new stuff. So those anniversaries don’t mean much to us except as a reminder of how long we’ve been friends.

But we’ve done a couple of them, and once we saw other bands do it—like I saw Weezer do the Blue Album show, which was super fun—it made it feel less weird. It gives you another reason to play shows or release expanded versions of albums with B-sides and photos. Still, we’re not that sentimental about it.

Analogue: I noticed you said, “a marker of how long we’ve been friends,” not how long you’ve been making music. Is that how you think of We Are Scientists first and foremost—as a friendship?

Keith Murray: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I’m trying to think if I ever refer to Chris as “my bandmate.” I guess if I’m talking to a stranger and need to establish context, I’ll say that. But really, I just think of him as my friend I make music with.

Same with Keith Carne, our drummer. We met him through auditions, but I definitely think of him as a friend first. And the band itself, we’ve used We Are Scientists as an excuse to do a lot of dumb things beyond music, like our Substack or comedy bits. So I barely even think of it as purely a musical enterprise.

Analogue: Some artists feel boxed in by their audience or brand when they want to try new things. But it seems like you’ve always felt free to use We Are Scientists as a vehicle for multiple creative outlets—music, comedy, writing. Has that freedom always been part of the band’s DNA?

Keith Murray: Yeah, probably because we were friends first and were already doing all kinds of creative idiocy before the music part took off. Music just happened to be the thing that connected the most. If we hadn't been making comedy shorts or writing goofy stuff for our website in 2003, and had only ever focused on music, maybe we’d feel more precious about it.

But we've always seen We Are Scientists as a creative agency more than a band. Of course, the music is the most successful part, so we focus our time and energy there, but we’ve never seen that as limiting.

Analogue: You’ve released nine studio albums now, which is a lot of lived experience. Some artists wrestle with doubt even years in—wondering if the well has run dry or if the muse will show up again. Do you ever deal with that, or do you feel like you’re always in motion creatively?

Keith Murray: If anything, I’ve had the opposite trajectory. Early on, when we were still figuring things out, I was always scared that each song might be the last one I ever write. Like, “I don’t even know how that song happened. Whoops—another one appeared. That must be it.” But the more we’ve done it, the more I’ve realized that, yeah, I still don’t really know how songs get written, but I’m not worried about the ability to do it anymore.

I’ve also made peace with writing bad songs. Early on, every song felt make-or-break, and if one wasn’t good, I’d spiral: “I guess we’re done. We suck now.” These days, we just write constantly. That takes the pressure off any individual song. When something feels special, you know it and you get excited, but you don’t live or die by it.

Analogue: Was there a particular shift that helped you move into that healthier space?

Keith Murray: Yeah, I think it was around TV en Français. I remember Barbara, our third record, being super stressful. We were undisciplined. I was still clinging to the idea that songs only came when inspiration struck—like I’d be walking down the street and think, “Oh, I’ve got an idea!” and run to the rehearsal space.

At the time, I was living in New York and just constantly hanging out. It was fun—friends from UK bands had moved to the city—but we were doing almost no work. I remember thinking, “We don’t have any songs. I literally have to leave New York City.”

So I moved to Athens, Georgia, for a summer. I only knew three people there—the guys from The Whigs—and thought it’d be quieter. I still partied, but just being there to work made a difference. After that, I realized I couldn’t keep relying on inspiration. I needed structure. So I got a writing studio in New York and just started going in every day. Even if nothing good came out of it, I made myself work on stuff. That changed everything. I got really good at maintaining a writing schedule.

Analogue: Looking at this new set of songs—Qualifying Miles—what did you learn about songwriting that was new?

Keith Murray: On our first record, there’s an unintentional theme because I was just writing about exactly what was happening in my life—being 24, drunk in New York at 4 a.m. But Qualifying Miles is the first time we noticed themes—like memory, nostalgia, a lack of sentimentality—and then built from there.

We had maybe a hundred songs we were working through, and when we started narrowing things down, we noticed those themes popping up. So we leaned into them—not in a concept album way, but more like, “Okay, this is something we’re circling. Let’s see where it goes.” That felt new to us.

Analogue: That kind of reflection seems tied to the reissues you’ve done recently. Did going back through old material stir any of those thoughts?

Keith Murray: Oh, absolutely. We reissued our second and fourth records recently. For one of them, Universal came to us and said, “We’re repressing this. Want a say in it?” So I went digging through old hard drives and emails—stuff from our old manager, from people at Virgin Records I haven’t thought about in years. That was surreal.

It definitely made me think, “Wow, we’ve been doing this a long time.” And I think that whole process influenced the lyrical focus of the new songs. A lot of it is wondering what happened to my memories, specifically.

Analogue: We’ve talked a lot about themes and lyrics, but musically speaking, what are you excited by on Qualifying Miles?

Keith Murray: This is our third self-produced record, and on the previous two, we really leaned into production as part of the songwriting. We were intentionally messing with things—chopping up drums, making vocals sound inhuman, using production to shape arrangements. For example, we’d take a drum fill and literally cut it in half, flip the ends, to make it sound insane. We were obsessed with getting perfect vocal takes just so we could distort them while keeping them coherent.

But for Qualifying Miles, the songs had this kind of nostalgic, memory-based feel, and we wanted to reflect that by making a more “live” sounding record. It’s not truly live, but we kept that idea in our minds. It's less manicured, more scrappy. We intentionally chose vocal takes that were wilder and left more imperfections in, and I think that only works because I believed the songs were good enough to carry themselves. That felt like a meaningful shift, to let go of production as armor.

Analogue: How much ended up on the cutting room floor? Were you sitting on a ton of material?

Keith Murray: Oh yeah, our practice now is to always have a zillion songs. We had over a hundred. Some were truly bad, but we had at least 30 that were in serious contention for the album.

Normally I have a rule that drives Chris nuts: no album should have more than 10 songs. That’s my hill, but this one has 12 because I just couldn’t cut any more. Every song felt necessary. I still believe in the 10-song rule, and part of me wishes someone had come in and made the cuts for me, but I couldn’t do it.

We say we’ll use some of those other songs in the future, but truthfully, we’re not great at going back to things. It’s more likely we’ll just keep writing and forget about the rest. And that’s okay. Not every song needs to exist in the world, even if I like it right now.

VISIT: We Are Scientists