On Thursday, August 7, Brooklyn synth/drum duo Matt & Kim opened for The Go! Team and CSS at the Trocadero in Chinatown, which proved to be a night filled with tons of fun and an abundance of early high school hipsters.

If you missed the summer’s best concert to date (we still have five weeks until fall term, something may possibly come up, but I doubt it), have no fear. Here are some videos of Matt & Kim’s performance, equipped with hilarious banter:

Matt & Kim play “Yea Yeah” which you may remember as the “food fight” music video that was overplayed on mtvU in the wonderful Handschumacher Dining Hall a few terms back.

“Silver Tiles” was the last song of Matt & Kim’s Trocadero set and possibly their best song of the night.

After the show, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Matt & Kim in their tour van! To see what we had to talk about, the (very long) interview can be found after the jump.

[Location: Empty parking lot in Chinatown. Sitting in Matt and Kim’s rental van. Matt offers me a cookie baked by some fans.  I decline.]

Kim: I’m so sorry about not being able to do the interview earlier. The traffic!

Drex and the City: It’s okay. I took off of work a little early and napped for a few hours.

K: Yeah! Awesome!

Matt: You know how I asked if you wanted to eat that cookie? Once, Kim found a brownie under a windshield and she was going to eat it until I stopped her.

K: No! It was wrapped in plastic. It was totally okay! You know those 25 cent brownies that you get at the school lunch—that are awesome? It was one of those! And these cookies are in a cool container!

DATC: Ever since your self-titled debut was released in 2006, it seems like you two have been on tour ever since. You haven’t stopped. Is it true?

K: It is true.  We basically just finished a new album and it took us so long to work on it because we would tour and then come home for two weeks.  And then keep leaving again.  But it is done and we did that shit! Now we are gonna have a week off and it’s gonna be awesome!

DATC: And when is that album going to come out?

K: Hopefully this…

M:…October.

K: That’s what we’re shooting for.

DATC: How did the band form? How did you guys get together and start this project?

M: Well, we were together, like together together.

K: Yeah, I was hittin’ that.

M: For years, at least two, two and a half, before we started playing music together, Kim would do my homework for me when I was in college so we realized that we could work well together. But she was trying to learn how to play drums.  And I had these small keyboards that I had found. We decided to get together because it is so much easier to learn with someone. But we had no intention of becoming a band as much as just learning how to play.

K: We got forced to play our first show by some friends.

M: We didn’t even have a name. We were listed as “Kimberly and Matthew.” Then we switched it and shortened it. I still get so much shit for it being “Matt and Kim.” It wasn’t my decision—it was mutual. Kim maybe pushed it more.

DATC: “Matt and Kim” flows a little better.

K: Right? I know!

DATC: I’ve seen the band play a bunch of times in Philly now and the last show that I went to was at the Barbary on July 4^th—which was a blast.  I didn’t touch the gross Colt 45…

K: Good choice!

DATC:…but my friend drank it even though it tasted horrible because it was free.

K: I’m gonna say that I did not have any Colt 45 on that tour. We had five shows sponsored by them and I didn’t touch it once.

M: You’re probably not supposed to be saying that, Kim!

DATC: But Matt, did you make up for it?

M: No, but I did drink it the first night.  I thought it was very delicious. I didn’t mind it that much.

K: Except for the next morning!

M: But I only had one.  Some of the other bands on the tour had a lot more than that, I’m sure. It’s dangerous, that malt liquor.

DATC: So how was that tour? There were five stops around the country.  I’m sure you weren’t traveling in this rental van.

K: It was funny because we went from “The Fuck Yeah!” Tour and we were in a car, driving down South and it was hot, gross, and unorganized. And then we moved to flying everywhere—where it was still a little hectic.

M: Flying, like, “leap frog” flying, where you fly one place, play a show, and then hop back on another plane was totally stressful but the guys that were doing [organizing] that were pretty on point.

K: Except all the equipment was donated by Guitar Center, but it would show up in boxes.

M: The one night that we played at the Barbary…

K:…the drums came in boxes and nothing was put together. It was like Christmas morning. It’s awesome, but you’re like “I don’t fuckin’ want to put this shit together!”

M: It was crazy to have our band and the Death Set play on brand new, multi-thousand dollar equipment. It was the newest stuff I had ever laid my hands on, in my life. And it was every night.

K: It was Christmas.

DATC: It was a successful tour?

K: Some broken keyboards.

M: When are there not? They’re not meant to be a rock-n-roll instrument, I guess.

K: They don’t like beer being thrown at them.

M: Yeah, no beer, no sweat—no moisture, period.

K: But you wanna know something awesome? We feel like, to all the kids who are stuck, you know, their parents make them take piano and stuff, there is this band you could actually rock out to, we found on YouTube.

M: Like a piano nerd, but now they are like,“Finally, I can rock!” Some of these kids are playing songs way better than I could ever play them. They are really good.

DATC: Is that what you do in your free time?

M: Yeah, I’m like, “Fuck, I forgot how to play that song. Gotta go to YouTube!”

DATC: Since you are always traveling, what do you do when you go home and relax a little bit?

K: We watch a lot of TV.  We eat a shit-ton.

M: It’s funny because it’s virtually like going out every night when you’re on tour. Like a bar or somewhere where people are drinking and partying, so when we get home we attempt to relax to the extreme—the opposite of going out.

K: But then our friends give us a ton of shit.

M: Yeah, you like to go out when we go home, with your friends.

K: So on tour, we need to wake up early in the morning and then drive six or seven hours to the next show. It’s a weird lifestyle.

M: We’ve gotten used to it, though. It’s gotten very normal. We’ll get questions, really broad questions like,“What was your favorite show last year?” and it’s just so hard to answer them.  We do so many shows, that it’s like asking someone what their favorite day of the year it was last year. It just becomes a total normal. Sometimes you remember the weird instances, but there’s a lot of good shows. And we hope that we have a lot of good days every year.

DATC: I’m possibly going to be working on a story about Brooklyn bands. Do you have any favorite bands that are coming from your area now? Any suggestions, other than the YouTube phenom piano rockers, who might not even be from Brooklyn?

K: But you still have to check them out! We can tell you our favorites: Parts and Labor, Japanther. I’d say Death Set, but only one member is from Brooklyn. It’s funny. We haven’t been home too much, so we’re kinda losing track of the new bands coming out.

***All media provided by Alysson Cwyk