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.