New York City. Home to more bands (and more bloggers) per capita than probably any other city in the US. With so many bands and so many words being devoted to them, it's hard to believe a band as good as We Are Scientists has flown under the radar for so long. But we're not here to examine why this is the case, we're here to see what we can do about it.

We Are Scientists was formed in California in the year 2000 by Chris Cain(bass guitar and backing vocals), Michael Tapper(drums and backing vocals) and Keith Murray(guitar and lead vocals). In 2001 they fled California and moved to New York where they spent the next four years gigging furiously. After influential British DJ Steve Lamacq caught their performance at this year's South By Southwest festival and started playing one of their songs on BBC radio, the band were quickly signed to a worldwide record deal by Virgin Records. The band has been in the UK since April in advance of the release of their debut album, With Love and Squalor, which was released in the UK last week. Now they are back in the States prepping the country for the domestic album release in January of 2006.

Prior to their opening slot for Ambulance, LTD. on Saturday at the Black Cat, the men that make up We Are Scientists sat down with DCist to talk about, among other things, their crazy tour schedule, signing a major label record deal and their album cover. Below are some excerpts of our conversation. If you want more (and we know you do) stay tuned for the second DCist Podcast, which will feature the audio from the interview and songs clips from the band.

Your record is already out in the UK. Were you signed to a UK deal first?

Michael: Well, we recorded our record, by itself, last January. And we played at South by Southwest and for some reason there were a bunch of British people at our show.

Chris: We played at the Hard Rock Cafe. So the Brits came over and were like "Where are we going to eat?" (snaps fingers) "Hard Rock Cafe!" And they all went there and happened to see us.

Michael: And one of those people was a DJ on Radio 1 named Steve Lamacq, and he liked us. And asked for our CD, which hadn't been mixed, but we gave it to him.

So he just came up to you after the gig. You guys knew who he was, right?

Michael: No. No idea.

Really? No idea?

Keith: We had a booking agent in the UK, sort of randomly, and he I guess had told Steve Lamacq about us.

Michael: So anyways, Steve Lamacq got it and started playing one of our songs on his show. So soon after that, we signed with Virgin and they decided...

Since there was already some buzz there...

Micahel: Right...They decided to just put it out as a single and we had to go to the UK to support the single and we've been over there since April.

So you guys are from New York. Seems like these days every band is "from New York" or moving there to say they are from New York, much like you guys did, although you were three or four years ahead of the curve...

Chris: Well, to be honest we weren't moving there to be a band from New York either. We were moving there because we were three friends. All of our other friends from college had scattered and we didn't want to live in LA anymore. So we moved to New York really as friends that had this hobby of a band. We knew we were going to have to have jobs, and indeed we did until about eight months ago.

Michael: There were alot of bands there at the time. It was right before the Strokes put their album out, when we moved, so it wasn't, at least to us, we didn't have our pulse on "hipsterdom" or anything, although it was already happening. We just didn't know about it.

Do you feel like your part of the scene there?

Chris: We're on the fringes, if anything.

Keith: I think alot of people from New York would know who we are at this point, but I don't think if you were rattling off bands in the New York scene that those people would include us.

Chris: Probably most people think we're a British band if they know about us right now.

Who came up with the concept for the album cover?

Chris: The original artist who couldn't do the work that we needed him to do and quit the day it was due. He came up with the album cover by dropping out and leaving us hanging.

Michael: We had taken those photos six months prior, way back in January, because a friend of ours had taken in a stray cat. I agreed to hold onto it for a couple of weeks and it turned out it was pregnant and had kittens under my bed. So we had all these kittens in my room for like two months and right before we gave them away we were like "We should take some pictures with them because that would be fun." So we took some pictures and we had some problems with the album artwork...

Chris: And eight months later, a deadline loomed.

Michael: And we were like "Fuck. What can we do? We have to turn this in tomorrow? Well, we have a whole bunch of kitten photos..."

Check out the We Are Scientists website for MP3's, videos, advice columns and more.