On August 4, 2006, Toronto thrash-pop duo Death from Above 1979 was pronounced dead — in the form of a post to band’s website where bassist Jesse Keeler came clean about his long-simmering estrangement from singer/drummer Sebasiten Grainger. Where Keeler wasted no time throwing himself into his lucrative electro-house project MSTRKRFT (with DFA79 producer Al-P), Grainger went into hiding, playing the odd solo acoustic show and building a recording studio, called Giant, on Ossington with Metric’s Jimmy Shaw. But after a handful of MySpace demos earned him a spring 2007 tour offer from Bloc Party and Albert Hammond Jr., Grainger pulled a Grohl and went about assembling a new band, Les Montagnes — featuring former Illuminati bassist and Germans’ Leon Taheny  — to pump up his pop-song skeletons into pure 21st-century Cheap Trickery. Now, after a year of steady gigging, and a debut seven-inch, “American Names,” out this week (in a one-off deal with Edmonton indie Rectangle Records), Grainger and Les Montagnes are ready to face life after Death. 

In August 2006, Jesse Keeler posted a message to the Death from Above website explaining the break-up. Was he speaking for both of you?
It was definitely his perspective, it wasn’t something we discussed. The break-up had been looming for a long time and it felt like it had to happen. We were putting it off for a long time; we weren’t even talking. [The website message] was the easiest way to present it without getting into details.

So without getting into details, was the break-up inspired by personal or musical differences?
It was entirely personal [laughs]. There was a break-up meeting where things were said, like “we won’t do this anymore.” It happened maybe two months before the Nine Inch Nails tour. But we had commitments to people: management, our sound guy — we had these things planned and it would’ve been a shame to let people down. We always viewed the band as a stepping stone to fulfill our own musical agendas, and had we disappointed that many people, it would’ve burned a lot of bridges that we didn’t want to burn.

In a way the break-up was appropriate: Death from Above started out as a side project that took on a life of its own, so the fact that it flamed out so quickly shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise.
It was just a surprise because a lot of people just started getting into it, and we were like, “Eh, this sucks.”

How did you feel after the break-up?
There was a lot of frustration and anger, but a lot of relief — it was like a huge weight off my shoulders. I was completely comfortable with how it happened and when it happened, and it was almost a source of pride to turn down a lot of offers that came toward us. It was almost like the whole attitude of the band was summed up by saying “no” to really good gigs. Though it did bother me more last year when I bought a house and was scraping together all my money, and I was like, “Why didn’t I play that $80,000 show!”

Did you immediately start writing?
I completely stopped making music — I had completely forgotten how to do it, and how I did do it before. [Death from Above] hadn’t written a new song in at least a year, and it took me a long time to recover from the whole experience, and be like, “I used to do this all the time; I can do this again.” I went through a regression, in the sense that I went back to what I had been doing before Death from Above, which was very meek and modest and quiet — I had to re-learn how I wrote a song, and then after that developed and I started playing with people, it got the ball rolling.

The first thing we heard from you was an acoustic ballad, “Young Mothers,” on the Friends of Bellwoods compilation.
I could’ve kept doing that kind of thing, but I was looking around at how I wanted to perform and be perceived, and that was not it. I see other people doing that thing, and it seems like a really lonely path.

Even though Death from Above were immersed in this hipster-party culture, you always had a self-awareness about your place in that world — lyrically, you’d take shots at how shallow it was, and talk about how you really wanted a family and kids.
I kind of regret that attitude sometimes. I don’t know what book I was reading, or what New Music interview I saw, but I had these real oppositional attitude, even towards our fans. In retrospect, I want to be a kinder person and be nicer to the people who buy my records [laughs]. On the last tour, my girlfriend came along and filmed some of the shows and we played this side show in Poughkeepsie, and there’s this part in the set where I felt like somebody pushed me, so there’s this video footage of me going out into the audience and grabbing a kid by the neck — and in the playback you can see he’s wearing a DFA t-shirt and he was totally into it, and maybe he hit me by accident, and I just pushed him as hard as I could. It’s embarrassing — he was there because he liked my band!

In the Death From Above EYE WEEKLY cover story from 2004, you were talking about how there are too many graphic designers in the world, and that people should learn carpentry — that people need to start working more with their hands. Was building your own studio a manifestation of that?
That attitude in that article was part of a rhetoric that we developed, and it was in that oppositional frame of band. I still partly agree with that, but I do think there’s a lot of merit in graphic design [laughs]. It was part of a “how to be a man” attitude that existed then, and I still feel that in order to be successful you need to have that tactile desire to go out and do things — it really is a mix between being an artist and being a truck driver.

Did the building of the studio and the evolution of Les Montagnes coincide with one another?
They’re kind of two separate things. The studio is an opportunity for me to work alone, and build the songs my own way without having to impose my 80 vocal takes or two dozen guitar solo takes on someone else. I found that working with an engineer and producer in someone else’s studio, I would shut down a little bit and become self-conscious. I thrive to be a one-take guy, but right now I’m just carving the songs out, and I don’t want to impose that on anyone. DFA definitely had a refined recording process. Our best stuff was us playing together in our basement, just demoing the songs. And the whole studio process was an attempt to recreate that in the way. There’s also a lot of pressure involved when you know there’s an audience or critic waiting to hear it.

Was it inevitable that you’d play with a full band?
The reason the band started was, I started putting demos up online and it got a bit of attention, and I got offered a tour with Bloc Party and Albert Hammond. So I had this goal: I’m doing this tour in three months, I need to put together a band and write some songs. I had a bunch of songs already for a record that I should’ve released a year ago. I also found that I had been used to waiting for songs to come, and they would come eventually, but there weren’t a lot of them. I found that you have to go in and work, you have to play a certain amount of time before anything good comes out of it. I feel like all the songs I’m ever going to write already exist within me — it’s just a matter of carving them out. It sounds hokey, but it’s true: when I’m recording or when I’m doing vocals or writing lyrics, I feel everything is there already, I’m just trying to recover them. It’s covered in stone and wood and nastiness and I just have to get it out of there.

How much does the band contribute to the songwriting?
It’s kind of hard to tell, because a lot of the songs that are going to be on the record, they developed through playing them. We even played 20 shows with very early versions of songs that didn’t have choruses, and weird thrown-together riffs with repeated lyrics, just because we had a goal: we have to go on tour and play. So the songs developed through rehearsing them, and then when I started recording in the studio with Jimmy [Shaw], and he pointed out that a lot of times that my bridges are my choruses and my choruses are my verses — so I started looking at them objectively and not waste a really good part on a transition. So it came out of playing with those people, and I really do trust their opinions. Both Nick and Leon have a really good perspective on things, and in totally different ways. Nick is totally pragmatic and his brain doesn’t exist in the heavens or anything — you could lay some hocus-pocus nonsense on him, and he won’t even hear it. He’ll just continue from the last coherent statement. He’s really good for song structures and arrangements, and Leon’s the same way, except a little more adolescent about it.

Did you have a master plan for what you want the band to sound like?
Essentially the record is going to be a solo record — I’m playing most of the things, and there are some songs that they’re on. I keep having to count songs and re-approach it. I’m working through this deal right now that’s going to be a digital EP and 7-inch release, and then probably in the fall there’ll be the LP. It will be like a back-to-school record. There’s also a lot of songs that I’ve recorded that I don’t want to hear anymore. And there are some core songs that I really love that I want to lead the record with.

Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the fate of the album?
I do, and I worry about it. But at the same time, the last maybe four or five shows I played with the band I felt really, really good about. In that sense, I feel more empowered — maybe the record won’t fly, but as long as we can still play, I’m happy. Sometimes I look at the climate of what music sounds like right now, and what last year’s best records were and what people are listening to, and I listen to those records too, but it doesn’t sound like anything like what I’m doing, and I worry about my place in all of that. At the same time, when I started doing this, I had no intention of following a trend — I’m going to do what I do and not force it in any way. I do love the idea of a record as a timeless thing, and the fact that you can walk down the street at night and look into bedroom windows and see Kurt Cobain posters and Jimi Hendrix posters and Rolling Stones murals. I just listened to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On for the first time two weeks ago.

When Death from Above started, the audience I thought would be there for the band was there for a little while, but we quickly went somewhere totally different, maybe because who we toured with and the places we played, but at the same time it was a huge lesson in the idea that your audience exists, and people are into a lot of different things and touring is how you find those people. There’s no other way to do it.

Are there certain things you find yourself writing about more these days? The songwriting feels more personal and honest.
I don’t think lyrically it’s that different. I’m definitely listening to more songwriter-type music — not acoustic ballad stuff, but I’m trying to pay more attention to lyrics. I really love writing good lyrics, but I don’t know anyone else’s lyrics, really. I think my lyrics in the past were almost moralistic in a sense — not in a preachy way, but it was like a manifesto for myself: this is how I feel, I wrote it, recorded it, and if I ever questioned my approach to something, I’d be like, “oh, I’ll listen to that song.”

Was getting into business with Jimmy a natural thing?
We kind of just did it, all the best things I’ve done I haven’t thought about too much. I was looking to buy a house for a long time and I had the money to do it. I was looking at places way on the east side, and for the first time I had to consider getting a drivers license because getting anywhere would’ve been such a pain. He was off tour for a minute and we talked about it — and then in 10 days, we bought a building together!

It’s ironic: part of DFA’s rhetorical manifesto was how you lived in the east end, removed from the scene and now you’re right in the thick of it on Ossington.
That was an adopted trait of rationalizing everything with confidence. We lived in the Beaches you know? Starbucks and Lick’s!

Is there a record deal on the horizon?
I’m working through this deal right now that’s going to have a digital EP and 7-inch release, and then probably in the fall there’ll be the LP. It will be like a back-to-school record.

Is it a label with whom you’ve worked before — i.e., Last Gang Records?
No it’s not. I wanted to get a super-friendly Canadian deal as just a way to start imposing deadlines on myself, because I could keep going for another two years without putting something out. Last Gang offered me a “friendly” deal a year and a half ago that I didn’t think was so friendly — it seemed like I was losing a lot of control. If I would’ve done a deal back then, it would’ve been fucking terrible. I would’ve been rushed into making a record, it would’ve been just OK, I wouldn’t have had a really good band, we would’ve gone out and played really big-money shows in front of a lot of people and it would’ve sucked. I’m way happier with the idea of “I started this band a year ago — and now we’re good.” I just want to play really well live, and I feel like that’s happening now. That’s why it’s weird to have YouTube and go back and watch my first show, and be like, “ehhhhh….  where was that camera two months ago in the basement of the Dakota!”

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