The Bravery

By Kevin Zimmerman

Mar 2 2008

The five musicians in The Bravery — Sam Endicott (vocals/guitar), John Conway (keyboards), Anthony Burulcich (drums), Michael Zakarin (guitar) and Mike H. (bass) — exploded onto the New York scene in 2003, quickly taking by storm both the town (The Village Voice tabbed them as “New York’s Official Next Big Thing”) and the music industry (regular MTV rotation and favorable mentions in Rolling Stone).

Gaining kudos as a key part of the then-hip “new New Wave” of bands like Bloc Party, Scissor Sisters, and The Killers, due to apparent musical debts to the likes of The Smiths and The Cure, the group has moved into more mature and serious territory with its second album, The Sun and the Moon (Island).

“I had heard a couple of Smiths records before, but the only time we’d heard the Cure was after we’d recorded the [first] album and everyone kept mentioning them,” says Mike H. “The funny thing is that Sam’s never owned a record by any of those bands,” adds Burulcich. “He’s never owned a Cure record, never owned a New Order record. He wanted to have a DIY sound that was influenced by disco — hence the electronics — and make something new.”

With the new album’s more unaffected approach, Endicott says, “It’s as different as it can be and still sounds like us. It’s a lot more organic, less synthetic sounding, but there are still a lot of unusual sounds on it. We went so synth crazy on the first one, then you start writing a song that way and you think, ‘Well, we’ve already done this song, kind of,’ so you try to do something new.”