Nuclear Pop Overthrow

"We'd always done everything ourselves, so it was interesting to see another guy do his thing," Edwards says. "The album probably cost us $24 to record, minus going to get Hardee's. If we had to pay for studio time, we'd never have been able to do it. We're all pretty anal, and we'll take six hours to do one thing. We only recut one song, 'A Light on a Hill,' which had originally been recorded in a bathroom. We touched up a few songs, but they were things that bugged us from the beginning."

More than a few indie bands would choose to cling to those inadequacies, wearing them as badges of credibility. But in their melodic outreach and unscripted sincerity, Margot & the Nuclear So and So's find a way out of the perennial contradictions of indie rock. For all its peculiar edges and metaphors of addiction and psychic ruin, the band welcomes the populism at the heart of pop music, defying ironic insularity and cool-for-cool's-sake.

"I don't like talking down to people, and I don't like being talked down to," Edwards says. "That's why I never understood indie rock. The only band to really pull that off was Pavement, and that was because they were making as much fun of themselves as they were their audience and their peers. I like sincerity, but I'm also cynical. The songs I love, like Paul Simon's, they're not making fun of you, and they're not trying to bust your balls. In a culture of cool, there's so much self-consciousness about writing personal songs, being sincere. It's a lot easier to be cool than to be laughed at. It's just like high school."