The Scientist: LeftLion chats 20 years of With Love And Squalor with We Are Scientists' Keith Murray

While their debut album may be turning twenty this year, the friendship at the heart of We Are Scientists is actually closer to three decades in existence. It all started in 1997, when Keith Murray transferred from Florida to California and begun settling into university life. In a bid to make new friends, Murray would head along to a watch party for popular 90s teen drama, Dawson’s Creek. As fate would have it, the party was being hosted in the shared dormitory of the band’s original lead singer, Scott Lamb, and Murray’s now longtime writing partner and bassist for We Are Scientists, Chris Cain.

“I was not at all interested in Dawson's Creek” laughs Murray. “But I was interested in meeting people, so a friend of a friend was like: “I think you'll like these guys, come to this party.” And indeed, Chris and Scott immediately became my best friends.”

“I didn't really have a musical relationship with either of them while we were at university. I guess Scott and I started writing songs toward the end, but Chris and I didn't play music at all until after we graduated. He and I were definitely more interested in cinema and comedy together, so that was really the basis of our friendship initially. Then we all graduated and realized that the real world sucked and was boring! So, we started a band and taught Chris to play bass. I was playing drums, which I didn't really know how to play! And our friend Scott was lead singer and guitar in the first version of We Are Scientists.”

Following university, Chris and Keith would eventually move to the Los Angeles area, with Murray at this time still following his degree in film production. Soon Scott Lamb would move on from the band and Murray would step up to become the band’s lead singer and guitarist, with drummer Michael Tapper also joining the ranks. From here With Love and Squalor began being forged, although Murray admits a career in music still wasn’t a consideration at this point.

“Our intention as a band was not necessarily to make a career out of being in a band. Like I said, we started the band out of boredom and just wanting something to do with friends” he explains. “Then we moved to New York in 2001 and started taking the band more seriously, but again not really as a career. Being cool is definitely its own important commodity and obviously, there were a million really awesome cool bands in New York at the time. So - like going to a Dawson's Creek screening party - a good way to meet other cool people in New York was to be in a band and play shows. The first four or five years living in New York, pretty much all our friends were people in other bands in New York City.”

“The band was kind of always a social enterprise for us, and just something that we did - you know, to hang out together. Then as the band got bigger and people started coming to our shows, then people started asking us about recording songs.”

From here, their debut album With Love And Squalor would enter the world and, like many New York-made records of the era, it instantly became part of the cultural fabric of the time. With its success propelled by MTV constantly airing their fun and dramatic music videos for singles like The Great Escape, Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt and It’s A Hit, the album would reach Gold certification within just six months here in the UK - selling on average over 4,000 copies a week.

“I think we were fortunate that we kept our goals realistic” share Murray. “I think it kept it fun rather than stressful. It is important to understand the business behind everything and to treat it as importantly as it deserves, but we kept making it fun. I think that made us put our personalities more to the forefront than I think a lot of bands do, especially at that age.”

“I do think that part of what makes that record (With Love And Squalor) idiosyncratic in its era, is that our favourite bands were all really cool. I mean that in every sense of the word, like very hip but also emotionally distant bands. We loved Interpol, The Rapture, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who are all really awesome bands, but not bands that I think of as being terribly emotional. I guess Maps (by Yeah Yeah Yeahs) is the one song I can think of that actually gets you in the guts a little bit. And I think we wanted to be a little more diaristic and emotional in our music than those bands tended to be.”

Around this time, We Are Scientists would also cut their teeth playing across the UK, including here in Nottingham. Their first show in our city incredibly was supporting Editors in Stealth, before then playing Rock City for the first time on the NME Awards tour with a stacked line-up of Mystery Jets, Maxïmo Park and a certain Arctic Monkeys - during the week the latter’s own iconic debut album was dropping no less. However, when thinking back to his fond memories of playing in our city over the last two decades, Murray’s mind goes to being toured round the city by Editors’ former guitarist and Nottingham local, Chris Urbanovich, and many late-night dining sessions at Mogal E Azam.

“There's a really good curry spot that's around the corner from the Rock City compound, and I've probably eaten there more times than at any other restaurant in the United Kingdom - because its open till like 1am or something!” reveals Murray. “But our first two shows in Nottingham were with Editors, so he (Chris Urbanovich) was always like “I'm gonna show you Nottingham, the way I know Nottingham!” I don't even remember what we would do with him, but he would just take us to bars that we were then never able to find again!”

“I do remember maybe 10 years ago we played Rock City and Chris Urbanovich's parents came out to the show. And they were like “don't go to stay in a hotel - come stay in our house” which is maybe like 20 minutes in the countryside outside of Nottingham. And it was really beautiful; we had a great time. Their house was awesome and they made us a nice English tea. So yeah, we've always really loved Nottingham.”

While the gig on Thursday is a good opportunity to look back and revisit the record that started it all for them, We Are Scientists are showing no signs of slowing down. With their next album set to be a milestone 10th studio effort, work is already well underway on the follow-up to 2025’s Qualifying Miles.

“We're always writing. It’s never really that we've written an album or started writing for the album, we just stop and look at the songs that we've written and see what they are. So right now, we honestly probably have like 50 songs written since Qualifying Miles. I have no idea if anything we've written will be on the next record. We're definitely not thinking about the next record yet, even though we are technically writing for it. As I'm saying that, I realize that's a weird position to take! We mainly do it that way so that when it is time to be thinking about the next record, we don't say “oh man, I haven't written a song in eight months. I don't remember how to write a song anymore!””

Don’t miss We Are Scientists playing With Love And Squalor in full at Rock City this Thursday, 1st October – final tickets are available here.