Maybe it was the collective bedhead or the skittishly straightforward songs with titles like "Stoned and Starving" and "No Ideas," but when Parquet Courts first caught the ears of discerning rock fans a couple years ago, the garage-rock quartet was labeled as slackers.
This was never the case, though, and the Brooklyn, N.Y., band's 2014 — their most prolific and successful year to date — proved it. They released their celebrated third album "Sunbathing Animal" in June, and followed it six months later with the more experimental effort, "Content Nausea." In between, they found time to tour the world. Last month, when SPIN magazine named Parquet Courts "Band of the Year," it felt earned.
The act finally took a month off over the winter. For guitarist and singer Austin Brown, the break meant working on a screenplay and scoring a short film for a friend, but not actually slowing down.
"As much as we do work and as exhausting as it can feel, the gaps between not creating and not performing to being back out on the road and making more music is always pretty short," Brown said on the phone from his Brooklyn home last week. "I never feel like slowing down. The band just kind of operates in perpetual motion."
Case-in-point: Parquet Courts — which includes singer/guitarist Andrew Savage, bassist Sean Yeaton and Andrew's younger brother Max on drums — kicks off its 2015 headlining tour at the Ottobar on Saturday. They will rehearse once or twice before embarking, Brown said, but the group has always valued in-the-moment evocation over pinpoint precision, live and on record.
"The songs have this experimental feel for us from the beginning," he said. "We really try to capture the sound of us playing those songs for the first time."
The approach, to this point, has worked. "Sunbathing Animal" was heralded as the band's most fully formed record to date, while "Content Nausea" — a work completed in two weeks mostly by Brown and Andrew, and released under the homophone Parkay Quarts — was a far less-polished exercise. Brown is proud of both, but cherishes the off-the-cuff production of the latter, whose songs he describes as "more personal and a little more revealing."
"'Sunbathing Animal' was a record that was recorded in really nice studios over three different recording sessions and compiled to create a coherent statement," Brown, 29, said. "'Content Nausea' was harkening back to the more homemade, DIY element of the group that did feel underrepresented on 'Sunbathing Animal.'"
It is natural to parse these records in hopes of finding clues as to where Parquet Courts is headed next sonically. But Brown warns that even the band, which has begun discussing its next record, has no answers yet.
"It's always unknown to us until it's actually done," he said. "We find ourselves in places that are unexpected to ourselves. That's a major part of why we end up enjoying the music so much. We don't have real concrete ideas about where we're going."
The band's future is yet to be written, but there is no question who holds the pens. Brown and Andrew, who first met as students at the University of North Texas, are a songwriting duo with distinct individual idiosyncrasies, but find it "impossible to escape the influence of the other person," Brown said. Andrew's verbose lyrical style has rubbed off on Brown, just as Brown's noisier compositions have affected Andrew's writing. Still, the results are found organically, and not like a math problem.
"We're not sitting there, talking about and planning it all out," Brown said. "There's not a lot of meticulous planning that we do."
The group's creativity is borne from the perpetual motion Brown mentioned. For many bands, the routine of the road can stifle songwriting, but not Parquet Courts. Brown is ready for the wheels to turn, literally and figuratively.
Downtime at home is "the part we're trying to get used to. It feels the most uncomfortable," he said. "It's almost a relief to get back in the van. It's back to normal."