The picket-fence suburbia mythologised by Real Estate doesn’t exactly tally with our current location: a strip-lit East Anglian retail park. But there’s a Nando’s in sight and only one of them has been before, so here we are in front of a plate of spicy chicken wings and corn cobs as lead guitarist Matt Mondanile, all tan and cheekbones, attempts to pin down Real Estate’s unique magic: “We’re making music that our high-school selves would have liked,” he says, “[The songs are] about nature, landscape, bodies of water.”
Evocative, pastoral imagery and high school definitely linger in Real Estate’s sound and story. Theirs is the lyrical suburbia of John Cheever and Updike: safe and pretty, boring but romanticised. Wrenching beauty from the mundane may have become an artistic cliche, but it’s not easy to pull off as effortlessly as Real Estate did on their self-titled debut album and its follow-up Days.
Atlas, their third and best so far, has refined rather than reinvented this blueprint. The band recorded it in two weeks last autumn in Wilco’s Chicago home studio with that band’s producer, Tom Schick. 24-year-old drummer Jackson Pollis (ex-Tiny Masters of Today) joined the band in 2011 and former Girls keyboardist Matt Kallman was reeled in for the Atlas sessions. The result is a fuller sound, but also a more forlorn one.
“People say it, but to me it’s not a sad record, it’s more based in reality,” says singer and lead songwriter Martin Courtney. “I was trying to write more about my present-day life, which is harder than writing stories or embellished memories from growing up. It’s easy to write about the past and make it sound more romantic – this is definitely a growing up record.”
Courtney, 29, married his girlfriend Heather in 2012 and they had a baby girl in May, two months after Atlas came out. Despite hailing from New Jersey and being affiliated with the Brooklyn music scene, he talks about an urge to leave New York.
“I think deep down I’ve always known I’ve wanted to be a dad in the suburbs,” he says, with an embarrassed laugh. While most young artists flee to New York to escape the suburbs, Martin’s escapism involves fantasising about returning there.
Much has been made of the fact that he, bassist Alex Bleeker and Mondanile all grew up in the affluent town of Ridgewood. Courtney began playing piano, taught by a neighbour, from the age of two; his parents are both successful realtors (or estate agents, as it were). In middle school he bonded with Alex over Weezer and met Mondanile, a year above him, on the the bus to high school.
“He was listening to some band – the Impossibles – on his Walkman and he asked if I wanted to hear.” Mondanile’s hair was dyed blue at the time (done specially for a trip to the Warped Tour festival). “This older guy wanted to be friends with me and it was cool,” he remembers. “A year is a big deal at that age.” Accelerated as teenage friendships are, he began hanging out with Mondanile’s friends and auditioned as a bass player for one of their bands (the gig went to “a guy who was two grades above me, had a car and could drive”). A couple of weeks later, on his 15th birthday, he found himself mildly freaking out.
“I decided that since I was in a band and all our friends were in bands … that we should play a show in my parents’ back yard,” he explains. “We invited everyone that we knew and it became a much bigger, scarier thing than I thought it was going to be.”
Hang on, he hosted his own mini-festival for his 15th birthday?
“That’s exactly what it was. It was stressful and embarrassing – all our aunts and uncles came – and all these other kids we’d just met at high school. I worried, but it ended up being an epic evening and probably everything rock’n’roll is supposed to be when you’re young.”
That September, 14 years ago, is since remembered as the first time he, Bleeker and Mondanile played a live show together. The three stayed close, went “off to hippy colleges”, and say most of their friends are still the ones from back home. Ridgewood lies 20 miles northwest of Manhattan with a population of 25,000, a median family income of $198k and a regular listing as one of the top 25 places to live in the United States.
“We were able to do art and music because our parents worked hard and were comfortable,” says Bleeker, matter-of-fact about the creativity afforded by privilege. “It’s something we know and are extremely grateful for.”
Later, when asked if they worry about making enough money from Real Estate to survive, Mondanile points to Courtney and jokes: “Well, he definitely worries, he needs to worry about three people now!” “Put it this way,” says Bleeker, “we don’t have second jobs and if we were in it for the money … we could be much richer doing something else.”
The window post-soundcheck and pre-gig, when there’s little to do but sit around listless and waiting, is perhaps the worst time to be prodding him on whether music and families are compatible, but Courtney seems up for talking. “It’s weird, we planned all this touring while I knew my wife was pregnant, it felt like we weren’t doing that much on paper, but ...” But? “But, it’s going to be hard to do this again. With a kid, every day, it’s something you’re missing. It’s only compatible because you’re forcing it to be.”
“Obviously, I’m aware most of my friends don’t have kids,” he continues, “but I don’t think I’m young to be a dad. Like, I don’t know, whatever, but I feel ‘millennials’ applies to people eight years younger than me. I don’t want to sound old, but there’s definitely a whole lot of people, younger or my age, kids on Tumblr, that I don’t relate to.” He remains unbothered by it, disinterested in the pace of trends, except “when we were putting the record out. Then I felt, like, ‘We’re a guitar band and nobody’s going to care.’”
On stage that night in Cambridge, the angst fades: Real Estate are better live right now than they have ever been and render the sold-out room silent. There’s a curious absence of cameraphones being waved or heckling taking place. One girl nearby gets teary during Green Aisles, while men with either thick specs or thick beards seem rooted to the floor. Songs like Had to Hear, All The Same and It’s Real can break and swell hearts within minutes and the concentration of the room is intense, but it does prove Courtney wrong on his last point – their fans very much do care.
Real Estate play Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 29 October. Atlas (Domino) is out now.
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