When the five members of the Thrills traveled from their native Dublin to San Diego in 1999, they just wanted to get away from Ireland for the summer. By the time they returned home four months later, they had found their sound: sun-soaked Seventies roots rock, full of Beach Boys-style harmonies and references to California locales including Big Sur, Santa Cruz and Hollywood. "We just wanted to get away from home, but we didn't really care where we went," says singer Conor Deasy, 25, a lanky moptop with a high-end voice like Stephen Malkmus'. "We brought a few guitars and bought a shitty little keyboard in a pawn shop. We got this cool place right on Mission Beach, behind this old punk vinyl record store." The band members wrote songs in their one-bedroom apartment and occasionally took trips to Mexico and Las Vegas and to San Francisco, where they wound up settling in for a summer, a year later.

Though songs such as "Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far)," "Big Sur" and "One Horse Town" come off as irrepressibly gleeful, they were actually written during a period of hand-wringing and worry. Upon their return to Dublin, the Thrills were dropped by the indie label they'd signed to before releasing a single recording. "We wanted to have a sound that was uplifting," says Deasy. "They're escapist songs, because it was a cheap way of picking us up by referencing better times and better places."

After recording a new demo, they began attracting label interest again and had a new deal by the end of 2002. The Thrills' first album, So Much for the City, has sold more than 350,000 copies in the U.K., and now they're working on winning over American audiences. "There's nothing we hate more than those bands who pretend they can't care less about being successful, but they'd step over their grandmother to sell records," Deasy says. "We like America, for all its good things and bad things, and we want to give it a really good shot."

JENNY ELISCU
(January 28, 2004)