BATTLES’ vocalist/noisemaker TYONDAI BRAXTON tells JODY MACGREGOR the secrets of their debut album and it’s earworm single, Atlas.

Trying to describe the first single from Battles’ album Mirrored, words fail me. My secret list of adjectives from a late night with the thesaurus is of no use. Ironically, I need a map for Atlas. According to Braxton, the band had a similar problem, which they overcame by giving each section of the seven-minute epic its own nickname.

“Metropolis is the bit that sounds like da da da dah-da da diddle da. We call it that because it sounds like a busy metropolis, car horns honking. We had all these complicated charts, so we could go, ‘Put metropolis in before the bridge. Then throw in extra grease.’”

Unfortunately they didn’t have a name for the part in the song I call, ‘everybody syncs up and the entire universe achieves simultaneous orgasm’, but they have their own codes for everything else. “We do have a private language, like any group of friends who’ve been together for four or so years,” he says.

Still obsessed with that song, I ask what the first germ of an idea for it was. “It started with that drumbeat. [Drummer] John Stanier’s girlfriend lives in Germany and he listened to a lot of German DJs. There was this movement they had called Schaffel, techno DJs reviving these old drumbeats from like Slade or – what’s another example – Gary Glitter, that kind of thing. He took the shuffle from Schaffel, that dum-da drumbeat, and we built on it. That was the basis of that song.”

(See, I told you they didn’t steal it from Marilyn Manson. Take that, stupid Internet people on YouTube.)

During the four-month recording process a lot of ideas were thrown around, and others were thrown out, including one that guitarist/keyboardist Ian Williams came up with after watching the movie Bring It On. “Before we even recorded the first EPs Ian had this idea to record with cheerleaders. We had a choir of eight girls behind us on stage at some of the early gigs. He had this idea of a chorus of screaming pitbull-sounding girls, but it just didn’t work out the way we wanted.” I guess there are some ideas too weird even for Battles.

With Ian Williams coming from Don Caballero, second guitarist Dave Konopka coming from fellow math-rock pioneers Lynx, John Stanier having worked with Helmet, Tomahawk and Mark Of Cain, and Braxton himself already having a solo career, there’s a frightening amount of talent in Battles. The word supergroup gets thrown around in relation to them, a tag Braxton isn’t fond of, though he admits it could be worse. “Better being called a supergroup than some kind of reductionist label. At least it’s positive.”

If you’ve seen their film clip, you’ll have noticed that Stanier’s drums include a hi-hat placed way up above the rest. “He injured his arm in a skiing accident, so now he can only hit that cymbal if his arm’s perfectly straight,” Braxton explains.

Feeling my leg being pulled a little, I ask if that’s really true. “It might be,” he deadpans, “It might be.”

Battles’ album Mirrored is out through Warp Records/Inertia. They’ll be touring Australia in September, but alas, not Brisbane.

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