Aaron Pfenning is terribly quiet. I have to lean in a few times just to hear him. It doesn’t help that there’s sound checks throughout our interview, “One, two, one two.” “Is that gonna interfere?” he says every time. In his whispered hush. One two, one two. One. Two. One. Two. Boy Crisis are jamming in the corner too. Laughing raucausly. Metres away, it still drowns out Pfenning’s interview. At one point Victor Vazquez calls over, “Hey you guys just chilling?” “No interviewing”.

“SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT SORRY, I didn’t know that was the case,” he calls over. “BOY CRISIS – write that down in your interview,” he calls out from the area of kidney shaped tables at the back. It’s the most audible feedback from my Dictaphone when it gets to transcribing. Other members of the band are wandering around with instruments, i-D have pulled out so they’re on an involuntary break. I dodged a head-height Oxygen 8 keyboard upon entry to the 600 capacity performance room at Kings College, where Chairlift will later perform. I walked in to find Pfenning on the scotch-guarded sea blue leather benches admiring the view of South Bank. Something he does sporadically throughout our conversation. He trails off intermittently, noticing a glass-ceiling boat or team of tourists. Shame it’s such shitty weather outside. “I like it,” says Pfenning, both South Bank and the weather. He is no stranger to sombre.  

Along with Caroline Polachek, who now works the synthesizer, in addition to singing, Pfenning originally wanted to make music for the backgrounds of haunted houses. Caroline came over and then the two went to Pfenning’s back yard. They were in Colorado and he had a big shed. It was really late in the morning, like maybe one in the morning, and they stayed there until about 8. This is when they came up with this idea for soundscapes. “We were like oh man, it would be so good to make music that was meant for haunted houses,” recalls Pfenning. He wanted to plan a haunted house tour, so started recording material. But they never did it. The haunted house tour. They moved to New York and started recording this album. But they did go back and pull stuff from it for the debut.  

There’s also the love of David Lynch. All three are really inspired by Lynch. Fascinated. “Him,” Pfenning calls Lynch, as though not even able to say his name. In fact, they made a tribute song for “Him” called Bloomingdales 92. It was on their Myspace for a little bit. Not anymore. They’re even inspired by the way in which Twin Peaks score collaborator Angelo Badalamenti worked with Lynch. Pfenning read about the way they worked together - Lynch would actually sit on the piano bench next to Badalamenti and was meticulous about what he wanted to hear. He would make Angelo play it again and again and he’d deconstruct it, breaking it down, changing the bits he didn’t like until it was exactly what he wanted. Angelo playing, David tweaking and changing the lyrics, the notes. They’d be there all day until lynch was happy. When Pfenning and Caroline are singing, they try to sound like a jukebox in Twin Peaks. “I really like the idea of our music being played by old crackling speakers being played in the middle of a nowhere forest, maybe a group of kids stumble upon it. I just always imagine our music like this,” says Pfenning. 

But it’s for far less sinister reasons that Chairlift have become so widely known. And their music is played in far more glamorous venues than an empty forest. Try mainstream television networks, at peaktime advertising. It doesn’t get much more anti-derelict-woods than the 4th generation of iPod Nano commercial. “Right – can we just get that out of the way,” Pfenning says, when I bring up the inevitable question about said commercial.  They were on tour with Arial Pink and  played a show in LA when someone from Apple scouted them, subsequently sending them THAT email. This was when they were on a very small label and there was no one working for them. The email just came out of the blue. “Did we think it was a joke?” Pfenning says. “Yeah, well we didn’t take it seriously.” They were in Santa Monica, took some time out to go to the beach, and then two months later recieved an email with a form to sign. “And they were like, sign this because the commercial’s gonna air tomorrow. We were like, ‘What??’” So they’d already planned it? So if they’d have said no, Apple would have been screwed? “Basically they make three different versions of the commercial and they pick their favourite – their  priority. Bruises was their priority.” Pfenning and co. weren’t particularly worried about always being pegged “The band with the iPod commercial”. The only backlash so far has been from super young kids. “You should see the stuff they write online, ‘They’re selling out’. But you know, if that song leads people to the album – that’s the real treasure. The album.”

The only problem is that the part of Bruises that they use on the advert is very different to the album as a whole, which is much darker. Retro lo-fi with ambiguous lyrics about life, love and the universe. “I tried to do handstands for you,” chimes Caroline sweetly on the saccharine chorus of Bruises, melodic and soft. Maybe this could cause its own backlash, because the people drawn to the advert’s song wouldn’t be expecting the album’s hypnotic synth pop, bare-to-the-bone art pieces, deconstructed without the structure and sing-a-long hooks of mainstream pop. “Yeah Bruises is such an odd one out on the album, you’re right. It’s like no other song because it’s actually our oldest song.” Its influence was Disney. Not explicitly so. But it’s there. The sweet surface and dark underneath. The duality. It’s the “slight darkness” that they love. “In our van we do have a lot of Disney movies that we’ve watched over again, Aladdin, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan. We love anything in Disney with a choir. We use little spots like this. Obviously not entire songs. These seemingly sweet features. They help mask the dark matter.” It’s this love of darkness and recurring themes of mysticism that make it sometimes unbelievable that Chairlift, with its love of atmospheric avant-garde and all things experimental or arthouse, could create Bruises: a sing-song lullaby in high register. 

 “I like the sound of pop,” says Pfenning. “Pop has a stigma, but I think there’s a real craft to making artful pop songs. Like popular music and pop songs are two different things. I don’t think we’re popular music, but I think we have the elements of pop.” One of Pfenning’s favourite definitions of his music is when someone wrote, ‘Beguiling harrowing country ballads’. “Stuff like that makes me happy. But I’m happy with pop.” They certainly don’t behave and look like a pop band. They’re making a video for every song. Some of which are art installations. Evident Utensil is being played in a Chelsea gallery as we speak. And just look at tonight’s performance: it’s stripped down. There’s no strobe lights. It’s basically a dark room – a dark mood. “It’s really vibey.” They’ve just been on tour with The Killers, whose live sets are a masterclass in ostentatious grandeur. But this isn’t Chairlift’s style. “What we do isn’t really entertaining,” says Pfenning. “I feel like we’re not very entertaining to watch on stage. Most people just zone out and watch – really into it, not even moving at all.” He returns to marvel at the drippy London scene below, admiring the sombre mood of the townspeople below, dodging shop fronts for shelter. “It’s like the darker side of pop.” 

The remastered version of Chairlift’s debut Does You Inspire You is out now on Columbia Records.