When last we spoke with We Are Scientists, it was October of last year. Their debut album, which already had a few singles in the UK charts, wouldn't be released in the US until the following January. Since then the band have taken the UK by storm, touring with the likes of Art Brut, Maximo Park and the Arctic Monkeys. Overall, it's been quite a year for the New York based trio, or so we found out when we talked to lead singer Keith Murray last week in advance of their show tonight at the Black Cat.

What made you guys decide to do this one last tour before the end of the year?

We had done a co-headlining tour with Art Brut over the summer and we had a UK tour booked before then that sort of cut into the Northeastern part of that tour. So Art Brut got to hit all the good towns, Boston, D.C., New York, etc. and we got to play Lawrence, KS. You know, nothing wrong with Lawrence, but it's no D.C. We've got to stop touring eventually and start working on our next album, and we thought this tour would be a delightful way to delay that. We wanted to hit the good towns that we were so cruelly robbed of last time.

That's funny because alot of bands don't make it a point to come through D.C.

Really? We love D.C.! D.C. is definitely one of the core towns for us. Nobody in our organization, our booking agents, managers, label and those people, nobody was that interested in us doing these last few shows. But we were mad that we missed them on that last tour, so we wanted one last round in all those towns before we had to sit at home for a while.

Photo courtesy the We Are Scientists homepage.

The last time we spoke was in October of 2005 and I don't even think the record was out in the US. So obviously alot of things have happened since then. Looking back, how has the year been for you guys?

It's been amazing. There's really no way to quantify it, it's been fantastic. Obviously we do way better in the UK than we do in the US. Unfortunately or otherwise, we spent a bulk of our time in the past 21 months in Europe, which is definitely fun and it would be ridiculous of us to complain about the fact that we do really well over there and therefor have to go over there frequently. There's something nice about playing in the States, both in familiarity and just the fact that I've been to D.C. so many times in the past as a visitor and then playing really tiny, crappy places, that it's nice to play a big show and have people come out and have a good time.

It's got to be hard to walk that line, dividing time between here and Europe.

It's funny. At this point the the record label has stopped pushing us over here, but they're still working the record over there. At that point you just cross your fingers and hope that it all trickles down. I don't know how much time kids in D.C. spend on the internet, but I sure hope they're reading what people in Sheffield have to say! [laughs]

There was a while there that every time I logged onto NME there was something about you on there, whether it was for the NME tour or you losing your shoes or something like that. Obviously they've taken a liking to you guys.

The NME people are pretty good to us and it's pretty funny because they are all fairly young people. Personally they're all pretty cool, so we tend to end up hanging out with those guys alot. And every once in a while they're like "So got anything we can write about for NME?"

You guys seem like you're tight with alot of the hot bands over there, like Arctic Monkeys, Art Brut and the like. So it seems like you're running with the right crowd over there.

One thing that we feel sort of weird about is that you never want to be viewed as a sidekick to say, an Arctic Monkeys. But I think we get away from that by having really big mouths and talking alot.

I would think being an American band would help you from being shoe-horned into that.

That does maintain a certain amount of, not to put too obvious a point on it, but a foreignness to it. I never really felt like when British bands came over here I considered them so alien. But there really is something weird to the Brits, especially when we're the only Americans on tour with a bunch of British bands. A lot of people on the NME tour were looking out for us and saying "Well, I hope you're comfortable being the only Americans on the tour" and everyone was making a big deal out of it except us. It was a total non-issue.

Well, at that point, you'd toured the UK a few times over, right?

That's true.

We never really got Arctic Monkey mania over here. Was it as big in the UK as the press made it out to be?

We first met them on the day the album was released and it went on to become the fastest selling debut record in British history...

That's something I don't get. I'm a huge Oasis fan, so it's mind-boggling to me that their record outsold Definitely Maybe. That record was a big cultural phenomenon.

Essentially that album is Definitely Maybe for all those 18 year-olds right now. I don't really quite understand the cultural chasm that seems to exist between Americans and Brits, that a lot of Americans claim to not even get what the Monkeys are all about. Whether or not you get swept up in the cultural mania, I feel like that album is a stand alone good album. I don't think you have to be a British kid standing in a chip line to enjoy it. Certainly the media whipped everyone into a frenzy over there.

So what does the band need to do to bring your level of success in the UK to this side of the pond? Is it just a question of continuing to tour?

For us, we're in a funny position of being a band that's on a major label that's not really into doing a lot of mainstream stuff and don't listen to the radio or watch MTV. The fact that we don't get any airplay on the radio or MTV doesn't really bother us. There's always a nagging understanding that we've made a deal with a label that would like to see us played right next to Ashlee Simpson, which we're not necessarily against, but it's not something we're going to pander to. And if it doesn't happen, we won't care at all. The only reason we want to do well and the only reason we hooked up with a major label is that we wanted to do bigger and better shows, which doesn't necessarily mean arenas by any stretch of the imagination. Playing the Black Cat is amazing. But the point now is not to regress.

Did having the record released in January hurt you guys at all? That's generally a graveyard for new releases.

It definitely is. We were in a funny position because we were signed in March and had the album ready. But the single was already getting played in England by the time we got signed, so we immediately went to England and spent a lot of time there. I dunno. It's hard to really know what's going on in a record label's mind. don't know if having the record released in June would have helped us.

So what's in the works for 2007?

At this point we have to work on the new album.

Do you have any songs finished?

At this point we have four songs that are just about done and a lot of stuff that we have to sort through. So it's hard to tell how much time it's going to take. I think we'd like to be done sometime in early Spring.

Are you going to use the same producer?

We'd like to. He's number one on our list. We're going to have a talk with our label and manager later tonight about that actually.

I've been reading you guys are doing Boyz II Men covers at the end of your show.

That was a sort of compromise that has turned into one of the most fun things we've done. We always hate doing encores. We feel weird about making people clap while we stand offstage.

Yeah, I don't really get encores. You're like "Okay, goodnight" when everyone knows you have a few songs left to play.

I've started to get over feeling that way. We used to get a lot of complaints from the audience that we didn't do an encore even though we just played every song we know. Like we'll play the entire album, three or four b-sides, a few new songs and people would still complain that we didn't do encores. It doesn't really make sense. So this last tour we did, we were kind of told that we needed to do an encore, so rather than coming back out and playing "The Great Escape" or something like that, we just started doing that song. It sounded like we were half assing it when we pitched it. But we come back out on stage in suits and ties and just karaoke Boyz II Men. And it was one of the most amazing things we've done, because there would be 5,000 British teenagers in a room singing along to this song that came out when they were eight years old. But somehow they knew all the words to it. Now we're all terrified how we're going to one-up ourselves. It's a good show ender.