Spotlight: The Orwells

Chicago wunderkinder the Orwells got banned from playing events at their high school five minutes after they first plugged in. "There was this huge heroin problem at our high school that year," guitarist Matt O'Keefe, 17, remembers of his freshman year. "Every week, there'd be an assembly where someone would come in and talk about the dangers of drugs and all that. It got pretty serious.

"Somebody threw this school concert, and we thought it would be funny to cover [the Velvet Underground's] 'Heroin.' The school deans were there and everything."

The band got booted off school grounds that night and never got asked back onto an auditorium stage, immediately sealing their fate as Fulbrights: The five teenagers, now college-aged purveyors of Hives-like punk, would major in not giving a single fuck. Since then, the band's recorded three albums in a three-year span, notably last year's heroic Remember When, released on Autumn Tone Records. Out of school and focused on all things Orwellian, O'Keefe, the band's chief songwriter, finds himself already halfway through a new batch of songs. He says he's been listening to songwriters like Big Star's Alex Chilton, Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, and Tom Petty.

"I look back at songs from Remember When now, and I cringe," he says. "I think that what we're putting out now is more dignified than what we were doing back then. [It's] bigger."

Where's that muscle come from?

"Boredom. Wanting to mess around with the structure of a normal garage-punk song, which started to get boring to us. There's more pop this round. That can scare people, but it's done in an 'Orwells' way, so there's still that feeling to them."

That feeling goes down like good smack.