Singer Angus Andrew broke his leg while recording the Liars' latest album, Liars, in Berlin.
"I got hit by a car while I was riding my bike, and I got my leg broken, so I had this huge plaster cast that went from my toe to my hip, and it was really heavy to deal with while I was trying to finish the record," he said.
But the accident inspired the album's first track, "Plaster Casts of Everything."
"It's a song about trying to remember what it was like to be a kid who needs to just get out in the world," he said.
At 17, Andrew left his native Australia for New York's Lower East Side.
"I was probably too young to do that," he said. "It was a recipe for disaster. I realized I had to get the hell out of there. I certainly thought I could probably get a job, but I was young, and I didn't have the right paperwork. It was tough."
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The Liars are on a U.S. tour for their fourth album. They'll play at the Launchpad tonight at 8 p.m.
Andrew said the band members reconnected with their high school years in making this album.
"We wanted to look back at our past, at the teenage years when music was vital to growing up, and we wanted to capture how we felt when we were into music at that time," he said. "We wanted to make it more of a record that could hit you in the gut, not go for the brain."
Each song on the album draws from an individual influence.
The song "Sailing to Byzantium" draws on trip-hop influences such as Portishead and Tricky. It's also the name of a William Butler Yeats poem.
"I used to read his poetry when I was a teenager," Andrew said. "That poem was really important to me because it spoke to the idea of not feeling entirely comfortable where you were born, and when you grow up, you need to cross the oceans and go find where you need to be."
Aaron Hemphill plays guitar in the band, and Julian Gross plays drums.
"I bang on the stuff, hit things with stuff, hit myself in the face," Gross said.
He said he banked on looking Turkish while recording in Berlin because it's less popular to be American overseas.
"There's different categories of Americans," he said. "You've got your ex-pats, and your tourists, which are loud and noisy, and you've got some who try to pretend they're not from America. I hated walking to the supermarket and hearing all these people speaking American. I tried to speak German as much as possible."
Gross said before first visiting Albuquerque, he had only heard of it from Bugs Bunny.
"I have a photo of Aaron walking in front of this guardian angel command post - this huge building with paintings on the side," he said. "I don't know if it was Albuquerque or not."
