Rock'n'Rollin' With The Punches

"I lost my voice yesterday," croaks Cadien Lake James, 21-year-old frontman for Chicago garage-rockers Twin Peaks. "It'll be alright, though. This just happens a couple of times a year, because I'm not an actual singer. I just happen to sing 'cause I feel like I have to. I've had a couple of freaky dreams about losing my voice. But, shit, if I do lose my voice entirely, I'll just run with the Bob Dylan shit. Out here on the road, you've gotta be able to roll with the changes. When shit comes up, you've gotta be able to wing it."

James is winging it, conversationally: handling the interviewing phone-call while crossing the border into France. Having come of age on the road, James and his bandmates are so conditioned to constant travel that the original idea for their forthcoming third album — Twin Peaks' self-professed "back porch record" Down In Heaven — was to record it in motion. "We were going to have a mobile studio, drive it around the States, and then record in different places," James says. "But, once we got into the logistics of that, it started to feel too daunting."

"We just wanted to be a rock 'n' roll band and go fuckin' play a bunch of fuckin' rock 'n' roll shows around the fuckin' world."

The opportunity to travel was, at the beginning of Twin Peaks, a huge motivation for the band to begin. Growing up in Chicago, James' family rarely travelled, but when his older brother, Hal, was playing drums in Smith Westerns, the younger sibling watched with envy as his brother suddenly got to see the world. "I remember when my brother was in [Smith Westerns], and they started doing well, and they were travelling to Japan and Europe, I was like: 'Oh, shit! That's fucking cool! I hope I can do that some day!'" James remembers.

It was such sibling admiration that inspired James to pick up a guitar in the first place. "I always wanted to be like my older bro," he says. "And he played in bands, so I played in bands. That was a big thing, playing with him and bonding with him through that."

In seventh grade, James and his future Twin Peaks partner-in-crime Jack Dolan started the first of a run of high school rock bands. They were 16 when Twin Peaks began in earnest, and recorded their debut LP, 2013's Sunken, while still in school. "By the time we started getting to the end of high school, that's when we really decided to do this," James recounts. "By then, my brother was in a band that was touring around the world, and that was a big influence on us. Seeing people around you, people from where you come from, being able to do the damn thing, that was inspiring for us."

Drawing inspiration from The Black Lips, their goals for Twin Peaks were somewhere between simplistic and idealistic. "We just wanted to be a rock 'n' roll band and go fuckin' play a bunch of fuckin' rock 'n' roll shows around the fuckin' world," says James. "When we did our first tour, it was just a bunch of basement shows and warehouse shows, going around the West Coast of the States. We had a fuckin' blast, just playing midnight, 1am, 2am, at all these places, these sweaty little basements. At the time, that could've been it. We could've just kept doing that, stayed in that zone, and been totally happy."

Instead, with their second album, 2014's Wild Onion, serving as a breakout, Twin Peaks have barely left the road since, profile on-the-grow all the while. They're set to arrive in Australia for their first local tour, and already have some sense of expectations. "Dune Rats, who we've played with a couple of times — they're some real fuckin' gnarly dudes — are from there, so it must be a cool place," James says. The tour comes 'presented by' Budweiser, and will find the shows being filmed. "It feels a little bit weird, being a sponsored tour, but it's okay," James says, "I just don't like to feel like I'm whoring myself out, and I feel like we've done a pretty good job of avoiding that."

With Twin Peaks' upward mobility, the band feel like they're often navigating where they came from with where they're at. But, even though they sometimes take a misstep — "once we played in an ad agency, in their office, that was just the most sterile shit ever" — James is confident the band's heart will remain in the right place; couched in their initial ambitions. "We still come from a DIY oath," he says. "Nowadays, we almost only play clubs, it's rare we get to ever do a DIY gig. But whether we're playing for ten people or 10,000, it's all still the same premise: we show up and play some motherfuckin' rock 'n' roll, man. You've got to bring the motherfuckin' rock 'n' roll."