A virtual overnight sensation, Cold War Kids formed in 2004 in Fullerton, a satellite town of Los Angeles with virtually no music scene. The vocalist/pianist/guitarist Nathan Willett, guitarist Jonathan Russell, drummer Matt Aveiro, and bassist Matthew Maust, former friends from Loyola Marymount University, found the cheap rent and ample character studies of the poor, overworked, and spiritually undernourished to be great material for their future body of work. Initially, the twenty-somethings worked day jobs and made music for each other in a storage room above a Mulberry Street restaurant. The band's name came from Maust, inspired during an Eastern European vacation that highlighted the post-Cold War history they had inherited.
Tackling rock and roll from a post-Reaganism perspective, Cold War Kids self-released three, six-song EPs on the Monarchy label: Mulberry Street (2005 Monarchy), With Our Wallets Full (2005 Monarchy), and Up in Rags (2006 Monarchy). The group featured jangly yet clean guitars, hand claps, and a loud rock sound. The first sessions were deliberately loose and fun, focusing on an overall aesthetic that included aspects of gospel with heavy stomping, chanting, and laughter as well as musique concrete techniques like banging on HVAC pipes or plywood while yelling into a tape recorder. They strove for the simplicity of Tom Waits, using style and presentation over advanced chord structures. All around them, Fullerton echoed scenes from Grapes of Wrath and the American dust bowl, while they marinated in the lyrics of Bob Dylan, the soul of Billie Holiday, and the jamming of the Velvet Underground for inspiration.
