The Cardiff Whales troupe of university friends better known as Los Campesinos! have as much luck as a lottery winner. Nary a year and a half old, these kids have experienced a larger share of circumstantial providence than we could ever dream. Their catching pop noise was fueled by the internet and a secure fanbase. But the septet caught a lucky break when their music was featured on BBC 1 Radio Whales and subsequently landed them a gig with Canadian supergroup Broken Social Scene. The rest is already history for a band that has just now finished its first full length studio album. Scheduled for a Feburary 2008 release, the forthcoming album and group of Whales kids are primed for the web 2.0 world of music. One which has weeded out the media fluff in favor of true talent. Need proof? Take a listen to their fetching debut EP Sticking Fingers Into Sockets filled with enough ambient pop clatter to make even the most jaded move. We had a chance to sit down with the drummer Ollie and guitarist/songwriter Tom to chat about their first time in the States and how they have handled their thrust into the indie radar.

Pensatos: Coming over from Whales you guys signed with Arts and Crafts and subsequently hooked up with Broken Social Scene’s Dave Newfeld. How did that come about?

Tom: A series of weird coincidences really. When things started to take off, one of the people who contacted us is our [now] manager Alan who manages the Super Fury Animals - and they were doing their record with Dave Newfeld. So at the time, it was sort of these cross coincidences. Alan asked us who we’d like to work with and we were pretty big Broken Social Scene fans. So the first name we said was David Newfled because his production is pretty unique and intense; the big sounds were ideal for us [hopefully]. We rushed out a couple of recordings. I believe we did four.

Arnie: Yeah.

Tom: Then we set out to do the album with him the following week. A lot of luck, basically.

Pensatos: But your EP you recorded with Newfled, Sticking Fingers Into Sockets, wasn’t with the whole band as it is now.

Tom: We have only been a seven piece since March. But we knew most of one another from The Academy growing up.

Arnie: In March we were a seven piece. But we recorded majority of the album back in June when we did the demo tracks and then September when Newfeld was on board. It’s been ridiculously quick, really. Pretty surreal.

[Pavement is] the one band we can all agree we are fans of.

Pensatos: Talk about surreal: this is your first trip to America as the band. And you are playing at Lollapalooza none-the-less.

Tom: It’s a nice festival and everyone’s been great to us.

Arnie: It’s organized! I mean, you get LCD Soundsystem and then you turn around and listen to Daft Punk. You don’t get that back home.

Tom: The weather helps a lot. All the festivals in the UK have been wet and muddy.

Pensatos: You’ll be back in the studios in October to record the new album. Your first full length studio press in just six weeks?

Tom: It’s strange because we never really had any musical direction. We are defiantly trying to push ourselves. We don’t want to make an album of just indie pop. People don’t want to hear that. So it may sound messier - we like to mess around with noises - but we just want to sound exciting is all. We just want to make the best album we can in forty days.

So it may sound messier - we like to mess around with noises - but we just want to sound exciting is all. We just want to make the best album we can in forty days.

Pensatos: You’ve been compared by some to the infectious sounds of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. I personally think you wipe the floor of their whiney noise. But I was surprised to hear that a major influence for the band is Pavement.

Tom: It’s the one band we can all agree we are fans of. We all have such different styles of music between us. But Pavement is the one band we all agree we like.

Arnie: I think we wanted to mimic them originally. In essence they are a pop band. But, once we brought some strings on we figured that was impossible.

Pensatos: For such a diverse group in both sound and styles, you took a rather plain name which translates to ‘Peasants’.

Arnie: We threw names about for awhile. We had no idea what it meant. The meaning was secondary and kinda irrelevant. We just liked how it sounded.

Tom: Spanish countries wonder why we call ourselves ‘The Peasants’.

Arnie: It’s cynical really.

Pensatos: A group of kids from Whales with a cynical Spanish name. Ideal.