Two years ago, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah rewrote the rules of pop music, but this won't save them from the kicking that's coming their way. As the first band to prove that the internet can bypass traditional routes to stardom, they are particularly vulnerable to a new strain of viral backlash that can become epidemic in the time it takes to refresh a page. Their second album, Some Loud Thunder, comes out on January 29, and for every web critic eagerly anticipating its arrival, another blogger is hoping to see them crushed beneath the relentless wheels of hype.
Clap Your Hands say they don't care.
After building up a following with a series of shows at a tiny venue in New York, they self-released their debut album, initially packaging and posting the CDs themselves. A handful of reviews heavy with superlatives generated online buzz, David Bowie and David Byrne turned up at a couple of their gigs, and soon, without signing a deal, without making a video and with minimal traditional promotion they were selling out large theatres, at home and abroad.
On their most recent visit to London they played to more than 2,000 people at the Forum.
CYHSY's leader, Alec Ounsworth, has consistently disavowed any interest in his band's popularity, and he's not about to change now that they've sold 300,000 records. "I don't bother with hype," he shrugs.
"It doesn't matter at all to me what people say. People say all kinds of things, and if backlash is inevitable there's something wrong with it. People are making up these fantasies in their heads as to what's going on when they don't have any idea.
I'm very very strongly for certain work that I consider valuable and honest, and there has been so much of such little value or honesty that has gotten through to the level that people commonly call success, so why would I consider that something to go for?"
The advance promotional strategy for Some Loud Thunder seemed designed to deflate expectations. To avoid leaks, critics were offered not a CD nor a collection of downloads, but the password for a website where they could access a stream of the record.
It didn't help that the first track is deliberately buried in distortion, creating a first impression of appalling sound quality. Eventually, after protesting that I was never likely to enjoy the album chained to a laptop, I received a copy, but only because the bass-player lives round the corner from my house in Brooklyn. It arrived in a plain brown envelope with "Tooth Fairy" scrawled in the top left corner.
Four of the band's five members live in New York, but Ounsworth is the exception and, as he does the talking, I took the train to Philadelphia for a rendezvous at Honey's Sit'n'Eat, a packed wholefoods diner in an edgy-looking neighbourhood. Ounsworth has lived in Philly all his life, and has no plans to leave. He is getting married this weekend and has just moved into a new house, with his bride.
The city fits him like the comfortable clothes he wears: a denim shirt, beige heavy-knit cardigan, brown cords, and a red woolly hat that stays on, even inside.
He admits that the streaming plan was "a dumb idea in retrospect", not because the music will inevitably find its way onto file-sharing sites anyway, but because he'd rather send out LPs so people can hear the album the way it was intended. Ounsworth is a vinyl junkie who gets "overwhelmed in record stores" and can't leave without sifting through everything they've got.
"I just listened to the new record on vinyl for the first time," he says, "and it sounds great. Here everybody is listening to the record on computer, which I would never do with anything, so I'm listening to it the way it should be, getting the correct impression.
"Whenever I get an album, I listen from beginning to end and take it as a complete work.
It's funny because, as caught up as this band happens to be in the internet, I'm far away from it. I never download MP3s or anything like that. I don't like the quality.
"
He rarely listens to new music at all, in fact. Of his current favourites, only David Bowie's Heroes and the Velvet Underground's Live At Max's Kansas City are less than 50 years old, alongside recordings by Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra.
Some Loud Thunder was produced by Dave Fridmann, best known for his work with the Flaming Lips, at his home studio in the woods of upstate New York.
As a result, it sounds fuller and more textured than its predecessor, with layer upon layer of overdubbed angels responding to Ounsworth's adenoidal wail. It is unlikely to convert many doubters, not least because he still shrieks like Neil Young stubbing his toe on Tom Verlaine, but its gleeful naivety and harmonic otherness will not disappoint fans, either.
Ounsworth's indifference to how it is received appears genuine.
If he secretly longs to play stadiums, he hides it well. "It's not that I don't appreciate people coming to our shows, or understanding and being interested in the work, but I don't need it," he says, firmly. "This is the first band I've been in.
It's the only thing I know - playing shows that a few people came to and then suddenly nearly every show is sold out. It's not going to be disappointing to me to go back. It's not a popularity contest and I'm not a politician.
"
The illusory nature of fame is a recurring topic, and he claims to have no interest in being rich. "The easiest thing in the world is to just walk away," he says. "I told everybody at the beginning of this that, if it seemed like this project was getting in the way of people's lives, then just make a point that you don't want to do it, and we'll cancel it.
" When I ask if CYHSY will still exist in five years, he answers, "I guess in a way it will and in a way it won't," before directing me to the critic Dave Hickey's views on underground art's transition to the mainstream.
Hickey turns out to be an A R man's bad dream. In Air Guitar, he writes that, when art finds an audience beyond the initial participants in a scene, "whatever happy contingencies fluttered around it disperse as it departs society and enters 'the culture' where it must necessarily mean less, but to a lot more people.
It's spectator-food now, scholar-fodder, so you may safely stick a fork in it, tell yourself you've won, and go to your room." Fortunately, Ounsworth isn't ready to take his ball home yet, even though CYHSY have already delivered on the "fantastical, idealistic" premise they set out with, proving that it is possible to create a sizable fanbase without the help of a label, and to sell enough records to survive without relinquishing control over their music to anyone. They have signed to Wichita in the UK, but remain completely independent back home.
"Everybody talks about how a label might make one's life easier," he says, "but if people have an idea about where things might be heading and are trying to shape it beyond what you imagine for the project, then it becomes more complicated. It's more of a gamble this way, but being on a label is a gamble as well. It's more difficult for large groups to become creative.
And this is when the music industry needs to start to get creative and take chances which might not fit a certain form or convention that they once had. When was the last time anybody took a big chance, artistically or otherwise?"
Ounsworth is strikingly single-minded, with a quiet certainty of purpose that many would consider arrogant.
"I am pretty controlling, and I'll admit it. Everybody knows that," he offers. The band's songs start out as demos produced in his primitive home studio, and although guitarists Robbie Guertin and Lee Sargent, bassist Tyler Sargent and drummer Sean Greenhalgh act as a creative unit, developing arrangements collectively in rehearsal, Ounsworth is assuredly first among equals.
"I don't think you can function in a healthy way if you're constantly playing the producer and band member," he says. "If it's something I don't like then I'll suggest strongly that the part is changed, but I let everybody figure it out themselves, pretty much. It's an endless process of pulling back and re-adjusting.
"
CYHSY have acquired a reputation for unpredictable live performances, ranging from transcendent to shambling. Ounsworth says nine months on the road in 2006 has made them tighter and more sure of themselves, but they can still be undercooked at times. Their New Year's Eve show at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan was a case in point.
"We essentially did half the set with new songs, and it was pretty much our fourth practising of them," he admits. "We're comfortable fucking up in front of people these days. I think that makes it more interesting.
It felt like our first show, which was fun for us, but I had to turn around to Sean and signal, 'time to stop'. It's probably the last time that we're going to be practising in front of a crowd that size. It wasn't that it was bad, just a little bit messy.
"
When he gets back from his honeymoon, the band will have a fortnight to prepare for their European tour, which includes four UK dates - in Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and London. He remains deeply ambivalent about the routine of touring, and talks about his frustration at spending so much time on a bus and so little time at home writing new tunes.
"Being away from it for so long I knew that there was something missing, and here and there it gets to be pretty dark," he says, "because my favourite times are when I'm alone in a room and able to work on being creative.
I don't know if it's a form of escapism, but it's like medicine."
Ounsworth has promised himself that 2007 will be different. In February, he will happily play the lead singer.
But in March, and for most of the months that follow, he will be a devoted husband and composer living in suburban Philadelphia, with barely a thought for his band. He's got a children's album on the go, idle thoughts of scoring a film and, as the boss of his own label, no-one to tell him what to do.
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