SXSW Music Preview

Nearly a decade after a group of D.C.-raised schoolboys uprooted themselves to Harlem to have their shot at New York's burgeoning rock scene (thanks to The Strokes), the five members of The Walkmen experience a bigger platform in Austin. When their first album Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone was released in 2002, critics drew comparisons to U2 and The Cure. But when the masses first heard The Walkman's sound in a Saturn commercial and on The O.C., they were exposed to a revamped sound. After bandmate relocations, Chinatown bus trips between residences in New York and Philadelphia, and three more albums, including an homage to their predecessors with a track-by-track cover of Harry Nilsson and John Lennon's Pussy Cats from 1974 and another from which all proceeds went to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, this crew is finally ready for another long-awaited release. "You're always trying to find new stuff and new inspiration," frontman Hamilton Leithauser told Pitchfork. "If you don't really push and you don't try something that feels exciting, then it's not worth doing."

Wednesday, March 17 at Stubb's at 8:45 p.m. and Thursday, March 18 at Day Stage Cafe Austin Convention Center at noon