Chances are you've already seen or heard the Robbers on High Street but just don't know it. The band has been through D.C. a handful of times in the last two years, supporting artists like Fountains of Wayne, The Sleepy Jackson, Ambulance LTD and VHS or Beta. They've been the house band on Last Call With Carson Daly and also had songs featured on The Wedding Crashers Soundtrack as well as Six Feet Under and, of course, The OC. The NYC (by way of Poughkeepsie) four piece has received heaps of critical praise for their eclectic sound, which we would describe as Spoon meets Elvis Costello with maybe a dash of Blur thrown in just to get everyone's attention. The band just started their headlining tour in support of their first full length album, Tree City, and you can catch them Sunday night at Iota in Arlington with openers King of France. Doors are at 8:30 and tickets are $11. In advance of the show, lead singer Ben Trokan was nice enough to answer some of our questions via email.

As a special treat, DCist has a pair of tickets to the show to giveaway to a lucky reader. All you have to do is email us and let us know what one thing in D.C. you'd like to steal and what you'd do with it. The contest is open until 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. We'll alert the winner via email.

You're "from New York" but don't sound like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or any of their blogger buzz brethren. Please explain. Has this worked for you or against you in the suddenly incestuous NYC scene?

I guess it's worked for us. People have a tendency to talk about the New York scene as a unified sound when that's not the case at all. I think the great thing about the recent flux of popular New York bands is that they all sound different from each other. And yes it's an incestuous music scene and you could play six-degrees of Clap Your Hands, but you could do that in every town. Bands here roll in their own circles and any reference to some sort of unified movement is an illusion created in the media.

Your debut EP sounded a bit different, (perhaps more "indie") than your full length record. Was this just a natural progression of the band's sound or a conscious decision to get away from the typical NYC indie band?

It was a conscious decision to do something different from our EP in terms of sound and songs. We saw it as two outlets for two different but cohesive recordings. When we went into record the Fine Lines EP we had half the songs for Tree City written but they didn't work. So we hung onto them and wrote new ones. The album contains some of our first songs and our most recent songs.

You just played a CMJ showcase with the aforementioned Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and some other bands. Does a CMJ Showcase do more for the band's exposure than, say, a week long stint as the house band on Last Call With Carson Daly?

Well obviously they're two different things. CMJ is fun and great exposure, but can be a little strange if not taxing. For us we play a hometown show to mostly out of towners who work in some part of the music biz. Carson Daly caters to a much larger cross section of people then CMJ could. I mean, it's television, in terms of numbers of people your music gets in front of, yeah Carson wins. We had teenagers come up to us at shows saying they saw us on it, as well as emails from older guys praising us for covering "Big Black Smoke." But, no one really watches the Carson Daly show, it's just kind of on. If I sound like I"m doggin' it it's only cause I had brutal food poisoning during the taping.

Your debut record is entitled Tree City. Pining for the suburbs already?

Maybe. I've always been torn between the two. I was born in Manhattan and lived the majority of my life in the city, but I grew up in the 'burbs. Shit, it was downright rural where I lived. We all grew up in the 'burbs. Didn't you?

Tree City was produced by Peter Katis in two separate recording sessions (since he had to attend to Interpol in between). How did you deal with the interruption to the band's recording schedule?

At first I though I wouldn't like it, but it turned out great. We had downtime to reflect and go back and fine tune. My vision of the album wasn't fully in focus even after recording for a stretch so I was grateful for the spaces to let everything settle and become clear.

Even though this is your first headlining tour behind your new album, this is your third or fourth trip through D.C. in the last two years. What are your impressions of the nation's capital?

Other than the clubs we've played at we really haven't seen that much. A couple of monuments here and there but other than that I could only tell you about the menu at the Black Cat. We need someone to take us out and about. It seems like a unique city. It sort a Southern-like town but its age and pace is more like the Northeast. Some of it reminds me of Philly, how wealth is poverty's neighbor.

We watched Almost Famous last night so...Do you have to be depressed to write a sad song? Do you have to be in love to write a love song? Is a song better when it really happened to you?

I've read that all songs are love songs, and Pete Seeger has said all songs are sad songs. Maybe all songs are sad love songs. How truthful you are in expressing your experience should have no effect on the greatness of a song. If you have to fudge it a little or entirely make something up it's totally justified. The best things usually come when your brain is preoccupied and isn't focused on any particular personal experience. Sometimes when you try to force writing about some vivid memory your brain doesn't want to deal with it all over again and it won't let you. That's fine by me. Personally, I find it a bit easier to start on an outside subject because anyone who writes songs or listens to songs is going to internalize it anyway.