Rock Kills Kid

Rock Kills Kid's "Are You Nervous" is an unusually polished debut album, melding early-U2 guitars with I Love the 80s synth riffs and Robert Smith-like emoting. But Jeff Tucker, the L.A. fivesome's frontman and songwriter, didn't always make such a slick first impression. "When I first met Jeff, he looked like a bum," says Rock Kills Kid's guitarist, Sean Stopnik. "He had a shirt that was down to his knees, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a bottle of brandy in his hand. I thought he was a homeless guy living in an alley." Stopnik was wrong: Tucker was, in fact, a homeless guy living in a recording studio. Crashing on a couch near a mixing board was economical and also gave him extra time to tweak his music. "I'd give Jeff [music] files and he'd play with them at night," says producer Mark Trombino (Jimmy Eat World, Blink-182). "He lived this record."

SOUND The band's more danceable songs, like the four-on-the-floor stomper "Paralyzed," evoke the neo-New Wave of the Killers and Franz Ferdinand, but others, including the chiming ballad-cum-anthem title track, are in the arena-rattling vein of U2, Echo and the Bunnymen and -- it must be said -- Modern English. "At the time I was writing this stuff, Creed was still at the top of the charts," Tucker says. "[Dance rock] is huge now, and we're falling right into it. It's weird how everybody subconsciously goes in the same direction at once."

ISOLATION GAME Tucker, 27, started playing guitar in his early teens, after his parents moved him to a new town. "I didn't know anybody," says Tucker. "And I didn't really want to know anybody, so I just said, 'Screw it, I'll sit in my room and play guitar all day.' " After a half-semester-long stab at college, Tucker spent five years working crappy day jobs while living rent-free in the house of a friend's parents. "It was a confusing time," says Tucker, who began writing songs during that period. "I was kind of depressed. I was mooching off this guy, and his parents hated me."

WELCOME TO THE O.C. Rock Kills Kid's early tunes were simple and punky, but as the band's lineup came together, Tucker began aiming higher. The result was a label deal, radio play ("Paralyzed" was a top-requested tune at L.A.'s KROQ) and the prominent use of the "I Melt With You"-like tune "Hide Away" on an episode of The O.C. Says Tucker, "When I heard it on there, I was like, 'Wow, that doesn't sound right -- it doesn't fit the scene.' I was all self-conscious about it."

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