Pacifier: …Into The ‘Fier.

Pacifier play instore at Skinny’s Records from 4.30pm on Friday. Their self-titled album is in stores now.

“I mean, isn’t the idea with being in a rock band to at least try to make it new and challenge yourself?”

Pacifier’s live-wire frontman Jon Toogood is getting fired up about what he sees as a scourge of complacency and laziness pervading what passes for rock music today. He hopes the imminent release of Pacifier’s self-titled album will show a band that’s doing their best to challenge themselves and their loyal audience.

“I don’t know if we totally succeeded,” he concedes, “but I think we definitely got an album that we all fuckin’ love.”

As Jon and his bandmate, guitarist Phil Knight, chat to me in their record company offices, it’s obvious they can barely contain their excitement about what they’ve created. And why not? After a decade-plus together, Pacifier have concocted a disc that absolutely defines them. Everything has been pushed as far as possible in as many directions as possible: the rock tracks are among the heaviest they’ve done, while the more reflective tracks have a subtlety and conviction that’s only been hinted at on their previous albums.

Jon says this is largely due to the influence of producer Josh Abrahams (Korn, Limp Bizkit, Staind), who constantly challenged the band to capture the real essence of each tune.

“I know that lyrically I was pushed like a bastard by this guy Josh,” he says. “That was the only thing for him about our past music, was lyrically it was very poetic and out-there but it was a bit ambiguous. So he was like, if you want to communicate with people, strip it back.”

“What did he say once when you were doing the lyrics?” Phil asks him. “It was something like, ‘uh, dude, they’re pretty dumb in the middle of America!’”

“Yeah, he was like ‘I understand what you’re saying, but can a kid in the suburbs in the middle of America understand what you’re saying - because you actually have some cool things to say but if you’re going to say them, say them.’ So that was really hard work for me, I mean I’ve never had anyone say that to me, I’ve always gone, well, this is what I think, blah blah blah, and fuck you, you know? But this time around it was like, no, say what you mean, and say it mean. It was like someone telling me to go look in a mirror and stay there for eight hours. Some days I wanted to get on a plane and get the fuck out of there. It was hard work, you know?”

One of the elements of the album that might surprise people is the prominence of acoustic guitars on tracks like Home and Coming Down. It’s not an instrument normally associated with the band. Again, Abrahams was and influence.

“Josh instantly said, right, with a song, if you can’t just sit down with a guitar and play it in front of your parents or family or whatever, then it’s not really a song,” Jon remembers. “So we went, okay, that’s the challenge, let’s give it a go, and we wrote a lot of those songs in the studio with just guitar and vocals, and then you would arrange a song around that. It was totally different because with a lot of our (earlier) songs, like Pacifier, that song’s really the sum of its parts, it’s not the sort of song that you could just pick up a guitar and play, because of the bass-line playing against that, and this playing against this. So this time around it was like, let’s strip it back and see if we can do it, ‘cause we’d never done it before. A song like Home (on the new album), initially that started out as a band song but then we went, well, why don’t we try it on acoustic guitar?”

By contrast, Pacifier, the album, is also home to some of the most ferocious rock the band has ever recorded, from the searing opener Semi Normal to the breakneck riffery of Trademark. Probably my favourite track on the album, Trademark has an intriguing lyric.

“Well that was from actually touring around Australia and jumping on Ansett planes, and their new slogan at the time was ‘Go Your Own Way’ - trademark!” Jon explains. “Honestly it was just a song about that new wave of advertising where you can’t just have a logo, you have to have a brand to go with it, so that people can slot it nicely into their lifestyle. It’s just so fucking patronising, and Coke - Enjoy Life, it’s just that thing of, those words belong to people, they don’t belong to a corporation. I just find it patronising. It’s like Carefree - a tampon gives you the freedom to be who you want to be! It’s like, it’s a fucking tampon!”

With an American record deal and booking agent for the first time in their career, Pacifier have a chance to make real inroads there. But it’s come at the cost of their original name; the similarity between Shihad and jihad was always going to be a problem in the US post-September 11.

“It’s funny, everyone was up in arms about it, but the people that it was hardest on were the four people in this band,” Jon says. “Do they think we went ‘oh, sweet as, that happened, we’ll change our name.’ It was like ‘fucking hell! We’ve worked for twelve fucking years, and then this happens'.”

"The thing is,” Phil adds, “since we started twelve years ago we’d always dreamed of taking what we do to America and just beating them at their own game, you know? So, what, are we just supposed to quit now?”