It’s a blazing hot afternoon in June 2005 on a farm near Rockwood, Ont., the site of small but mighty backyard music festival Track and Field. The festival organizers have a habit of booking bands that will have the Toronto critics drooling in a year’s time, but the D’Urbervilles are excited just to play to people they don’t know. They’ve got their parents’ cars — a step up from hauling gear around Guelph in little red wagons — and have hastily borrowed a set of sticks from We’re Marching On’s Steve Hesselink (their future interim drummer).

Bassist Kyle Donnelly is trying to keep down his lunch. He’s noticed the Weakerthans’ Jason Tait and the Constantines’ Bry Webb sprawled on the grass, waiting for them to start. There’s no time to freak out. They begin, and in another moment, it’s done. As usual, the D’Urbervilles themselves don’t notice how damn good they are.  

Almost three years later, they’ve finally released their debut — the record that anyone who caught the band in its nascent year was praying for. It’s sinewy and lean, but strapping — there’s not an ounce of fat on it from start to finish. From the tidy finger snaps to the nimble basslines, from singer John O’Regan’s preternaturally calm voice (even when shouting) to the clean squawks of Tim Bruton’s guitar, We Are the Hunters is a smouldering, soulful excursion into post-punk.

And, despite the fact that two pinch-hitting drummers stepped in to complete the recording, it’s cohesive and inventive, fully digesting its post-punk influences while tension simmers and crackles throughout. The chemistry between the two guitarists is naturally occurring, since O’Regan and Bruton have hung out since they were seven, in Oshawa. They connected with Donnelly and Colin Smith, their founding drummer (who also named the band), at university in Guelph and, after a summer in Oshawa, came back determined to kick-start a band.

They didn’t stumble upon their sound; it’s something they analyzed and passionately negotiated as it developed. “It might be risky to say so, but I listen to Spoon a lot more than other new music,” explains O’Regan when we meet on deepest Queen West. “I like seeing how far you can get with the skeleton of a song, and recognizing that you don’t need any more.”

Bruton chips in, “When we like how a really simple element sounds, we want to explore the air around that. I think of guitar as texture. It’s not something you hold on to, it’s something you hear and then focus back on the drum and the bass.” Bruton’s been stretching himself further still, moonlighting with The Magic, a glammed-up rock ’n’ soul project featuring former members of the Barmitzvah Brothers. “I get to do even more subtle things, it’s a different job,” he explains. “I took a long time this summer just to think about what I want to do on guitar.”

Despite the fact that the D’Urbervilles are one of Toronto’s current “Hot Tips” — one of their more self-conscious song titles — they still see themselves as 22-year-old Oshawa students who “snuck in somehow” to the Guelph-Toronto scene centred around the intersecting circles of the Ohbijou/Bellwoods-Social Arts Club-Burnt Oak communities.

“For our first year of existence, our only goal was impressing Stuart Duncan,” deadpans O’Regan, referring to the taciturn Guelph (now Toronto-based) promoter who did sound for their first show as an electric rock band. He booked their earliest gigs, including a double bill where they upstaged Republic of Safety, and recorded their first demos in an all-night, Jolt-fuelled session at the campus radio station. “It was about a year before he told us he actually liked us,” laughs Donnelly.

Now Duncan is helping launch them on his fledgling Toronto label Out of This Spark. They’ve appeared on other releases including that of D’Urbervilles tourmates and collaborators Forest City Lovers (Donnelly is in both), and the Ohbijou-curated compilation Friends in Bellwoods. It’s the outspoken advocacy of the Bellwoods crowd, spearheaded by Ohbijou and We’re Marching On, that has opened countless doors for the D’Urbs on word of mouth alone.

“The first thing they said when we got off stage was, ‘Man, you guys are so young!’” says Bruton of that first fateful Track and Field show, when he first met We’re Marching On’s Steve Lappano and Hesselink. “We really see them as our big brothers. When I think of my friends now who play music, it’s all those people we met that first weekend.”