What do you do growing up in Leeds, England? Get into fights or form a band. For four teenagers that make up The Music, creating it was the only cure to the surrounding mediocrity on the streets. Bred on the grunge music of the ‘90s and influenced by England’s club culture, The Music is a danceable hard rock hybrid. Their recent success is another example of how quickly word travels in a small country and how that can lead to a direct ticket to the States.

“We were just playing in a room behind a closed door and then we started doing a few gigs around Leeds and close by,” explains lead singer Robert Harvey on his tour bus parked outside a Pittsburgh club. “We entered a competition and that’s where our manager saw us. The rest is pretty blurred really.” Their manager Tim Vigon is also responsible for finding the melodic band Embrace, and is at hand on The Music’s first US tour with Australian group The Vines.

The next step: performances around England and Europe with bands like the Charlatans and Oasis. They appeared on covers of NME and The Face and featured in Dazed & Confused, Sleaze Nation, I-D, and Time Out London. They were turned into the next rock ‘n’ roll stars with enthusiastic youth written all over their faces. Touring with The Vines in the States while supporting their self-titled debut, their sobriety is an advantage next to the drunken bare belly of lead singer Craig Nicholls. Harvey’s slight physique on stage doesn’t resemble his powerful bellows and wails that seem to be pointed at the stars.

“I’m quite pissed off about a lot of things,” says Harvey. “I don’t like trying to get pissed off because it doesn’t help anything, but there are a lot of things that surround people 19, 20, even 25 that confuses us. Everything about where we’re living totally confuses us.” Behind their songs is a deep need to reflect the chaos of becoming an adult and the choices you are forced to make. To the band, The Music is about choosing the road less traveled and rebelling against a society that tells them they need to go to university and fit a work mold. They are experiencing the music industry’s need for a hit record first hand, and while they feel surrounded by good people at the moment, pressure is crashing up against their door. “It makes us angry. We know these things are going on,” says Harvey. “It’s all about money. It’s all people care about.”

This drive for an answer to life’s impending questions is evident in the song “The People.” The main hook is “The people change the way you live now,” a cry to the masses huddled under the control of a few. “I’m 19, I can’t put my finger on it what it is,” Harvey comments on the song’s inspiration. “A lot of people are unhappy like my brother. He’s like 22. Something’s wrong. He’s been working four or five years now. He don’t like his job. That’s not good.”

Although they are reflective in person, on stage guitarist Andrew Nutter blasts the audience with mammoth riffs and Phil Jordan looks like he is losing control pounding on the drums, but together a melody works its way out. Along with bassist Stuart Coleman, a repetitive harmony comes crashing out of them and people start bouncing. Unlike the quieter sound of Starsailor, Coldplay, and Travis, The Music returns to the heavy guitar hooks that made Oasis popular, but with subtle, elongated influences of Radiohead.

But don’t ask them who their influences are. They think the question trite, and would rather be mysterious in their trek for life’s mores. If they seem naive offstage, it all disappears once the theater lights make shadows on their faces, aging them a decade. “No one can touch us when we are on stage,” mused Harvey. “No one can say stop doing that, you’re too loud, you’re moving too quick. We’re not an angry band. We see problems in the world and we try to put a positive edge in everything we do.”

In the end, The Music has escaped from the doldrums of life’s little tragedies and found a world of sound where they are little giants up against a world they don’t understand, even if the light only twinkles a few moments.

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