Japandroids have made a career out of making a spartan set-up sound big as all hell. Their most recent album is full of songs so epic and life-affirming that it’s hard to remember that there’s only two of them. Even more impressively, they manage to bring that scope, scale and surprising massive-ness to their live set. The duo threw themselves into a performance of the title track off of Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, throwing away any sort of rock star pretense and just trying as hard as they can for the audience in-studio and over-the-air.
The performance is great enough on its own. But when you couple the band’s frenetic set with the meta-narrative of all the groups that have sprouted up in their too-long absence and attempted to snatch the whoa oh oh crown, Brian King and David Prowse take on the aura of sweaty kings returning to claim their DIY thrones.
That’s a long-winded way to say their performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is really intense and really great, much like the band themselves. Check it out up top.
Near To The Wild Heart Of Life is out now, and you can stream it — along with the rest of January’s great release slate — here.
