Who are they?
A gang of two — singer/guitarist Brian King and drummer/shouter David Prowse — from Vancouver, BC.

David Prowse? You mean the guy who played Darth Vader? Awesome!
Actually no. “Every time I go into a video store I get that,” sighs Japandroids’ Prowse who, aside from a shared name, has absolutely no relation to the British actor who gave physical form to the Lord of Sith. And while this coincidence, coupled with their band name, might suggest King and Prowse are a couple of sci-fi nerds who hang out at ComicCons, the joyful noise they make as Japandroids comes from a very real, desperate place.

The duo’s excellent debut full-length, Post-Nothing (out in April) is stacked with raucous outsider anthems — complete with windmilled guitar riffs, smash-and-bash drum rolls and holler-and-response hooks — coming from a couple of guys who play according to punk’s loud-fast-rules edict, but are keenly aware of the pressures (work, relationships, aging) trying to slow them down. It’s the sound of a band for whom nothing has come easily, and nothing is taken for granted.

“One thing about our band is it’s been very DIY for us from the beginning,” says Prowse, who formed Japandroids with King in 2006. “We do everything from writing our music to designing posters to doing huge mailouts of our EPs to setting up almost all the shows we’ve played. This band has been a full-time job for Brian and I for quite some time — even though we don’t get paid for it.”

Sounds like heavy stuff for a Vancouver band — isn’t everyone there supposed to be all happy doing their yoga and mountain-climbing and shit?
Vancouver may be Canada’s third largest city, and arguably its most picturesque. But for a band surviving hand to mouth, it can be an especially unforgiving place. So it’s fitting that Japandroids’ love/hate relationship with their city informs many of Post-Nothing’s songs, from expressions of neighbourhood pride (“Rockers East Vancouver”) to petty complaints about the weather (“It’s raining in Vancouver/ But I don’t give a fuck”) to rallying cries for a community that’s falling apart (“The Boys Are Leaving Town”).

“Vancouver is a beautiful city but there are a lot of things that are frustrating about it,” Prowse says. “We have venues shutting down what feels like every week, bands moving elsewhere, and a lot of bands who just don’t get their due. And it’s a lot more isolated than a most people realize: to reach the next big market, you either have to take a boat [to Victoria], cross the border or you’ve got to drive 12 hours through mountains — so you basically can only go in the summer.

“But because of that, there’s this resilience that’s pretty interesting. If you look at the noise/‘weird-punk’ scene, it’s pretty impressive because those guys all support each other so much and there’s a lot of collaboration. It’s not really our scene, but I like it a lot.”

So what is their scene?
Whadda ya got? While Vancouver has made notable contributions to both the pop (The New Pornographers) and hard-rock (Black Mountain) ends of the indie spectrum, while boasting a thriving underground network of noise bands, the fact that Japandroids could conceivably adapt to any of these scenes means they claim allegiance to none of them.

“There are a million shows going on in Vancouver, but it’s very much in these isolated pocket scenes. You’re going to have a standard noise show with a lot of the same bands playing every week; you’re going to have your more straight-ahead punk-rock shows going every week, you’re going to have your singer/songwriter nights going every week. We’re in a weird realm — we’re too loud for the pop bands and we’re too poppy for the noise bands.”

So would Prowse and King ever consider hiring a bassist, if only to keep them company?
“I don’t think either of us are that easy to get along with, so having another person who’d be willing to put up with us on a long-term basis is pretty impossible,” Prowse says. “We sound so complete as a two-piece anyway — one of the things I’m proudest about with our band is how much noise we can make with two people. When we lock in, it’s pretty much unstoppable.”