Sebastien Grainger Stages Return

Of all the Canadian bands who broke up long before their expiry dates came due, Death From Above 1979 remain among the most popular. Their songs still get piles of radio play and you can't go a week without seeing their T-shirts on the street.

But if anything good — besides MSTRKRFT, sort of — has come from a bad situation, it's frontman/drummer Sebastien Grainger's solo career.

Though Grainger has been performing with his band The Mountains since early last year, his American Names EP just came out in June, marking the end of a four-year absence from record stores.

What was up in the interim?

"Creatively, I was writing," Grainger says on a Toronto cafe patio. "But more importantly, I bought a house and built a studio in it with [Metric's] Jimmy Shaw, and that took up pretty much that whole time."

There's a little more to it than that. Grainger made pains to avoid capitalizing directly on DFA 1979's success. He intentionally stayed out of the spotlight for almost all of 2006 to let his former band's popularity peter out (though that still hasn't actually come to pass).

But most importantly, he spent his time crafting an entirely new sound. That was made more difficult by DFA 1979's lack of productivity in their final years.

"DFA hadn't written a new song in two years," Grainger reveals. "We had a couple of riffs that we would play during soundcheck, but we hadn't written a song in so long.

"The last thing we wrote was a B-side that was on the remix record that we recorded in the U.K., but it wasn't very productive."

Some adjustments were made: Grainger ditched drums for guitar and found himself directly under the spotlight, which he wasn't used to.

"[In the past,] I was behind the drums, even though they were sideways, whatever," he says. "But I never felt like I was performing, which is weird.

"So all of a sudden to be playing guitar and singing felt weird. And kind of taking a risk, doing that was exciting. I've never played guitar in a band. I've played guitar my whole life, but never in a band. It was like, 'This is how it works.' It was a good kick in the ass to do it."

Sebastien Grainger & The Mountains' self-titled full-length debut will be out on Outside Music in Canada and Saddle Creek in the U.S. on Oct. 21. In the meantime, you can catch them here:

Sept. 19 Hamilton, ON @ The Pepper Jack Cafe w/Holy Fuck
Sept. 20 Waterloo, ON @ Starlight w/Apostle Of Hustle
Sept. 25 Toronto, ON @ Phoenix Concert Theatre w/Holy Fuck
Sept. 26 Kingston, ON @ The Grad Club (Queen's University) w/Holy Fuck
Sept. 27 Peterborough, ON @ The Montreal House w/Holy Fuck
Oct. 3 Montreal, QC @ Le National w/Wintersleep (Pop Montreal)