In their decade-plus of rocking out, the Dirtbombs have become ever more sophisticated in their quest for the unsophisticated. So it’s no surprise that the garage-rock act’s journey would take it to that bastion of the elite, the Cannes Film Festival. Or that, once there, the quintet would go over like George W. Bush belting out “La Marseillaise” at the Arc de Triomphe.

Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad.

“They liked the one song,” says singer-guitarist Mick Collins, reached at home in Detroit. The band showed up to play “Chains of Love”, a track lifted from the band’s 2001 album Ultraglide in Black for inclusion on the soundtrack to last year’s acclaimed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. “And then we played nine more songs and it was like, ‘Okay, you’re done.’ But it was fine. I saw Catherine Deneuve and met the director.”

In this case, that was Julian Schnabel. So, while others in the film world might not get the Dirtbombs, the art-world enfant terrible–turned–director is—like thousands of others who have joined the cult of this unique two-drum-kit, two-bass outfit—obviously in the know.

For the uninitiated, the Dirtbombs’ latest, We Have You Surrounded, is a good place to start. Though not as life-changing as the band’s devastating live sets, tunes like “Ever Lovin’ Man” and “Wreck My Flow” showcase Collins’s passion for the basic building blocks of rock ’n’ roll: simple lyrics, primal vocals, and a driving beat. But the band’s fourth studio album also reflects his eagerness to find inspiration out of the garage. “Sherlock Holmes” is a cover of a tune by cheeky pop band Sparks, while Collins borrowed the lyrics to “Leopardman at C&A?” from graphic-novel writer Alan Moore (From Hell, Watchmen). The latter song, an apocalyptic vision set to thick power chords and tribal drumming, features such memorable lines as “We’ll hunt down television sets and kill them for their skins/We’ll squeeze the juice from cellphones and smear it on our faces.”

“I had seen the lyrics in a comic book, and I had heard that he’d written the song for Bauhaus,” Collins says. “So I tried to track a recording down. It turned out there was none, so I thought, ‘To heck with this, I’ll just write my own music.’ ”

The singer’s love of certain aspects of pop culture, from comic books to old rock ’n’ roll records, is at the core of the Dirtbombs’ aesthetic. So is a sense of eclecticism—in recent months the band has recorded covers of INXS and Suicide tunes for 7” singles, one of its favourite outlets. But it could be that the Dirtbombs are just a little too freewheeling and adventurous for their own good. While Collins and his bandmates—and there have been several over the years—have collected more than their share of press kudos, commercial success has been elusive. Yet other acts—hello, White Stripes—have done well with the back-to-the-garage sound the Dirtbombs helped revitalize. Not that Collins harbours any resentment.

“It is what it is, man,” he says. “I don’t even really think about it. I’m doing what I do, and the crowds are growing. I don’t harbour any issues with other bands. We call it ‘the Dirtbombs blessing’—almost every band that’s opened for us has gone on to become media darlings.”

The Dirtbombs play Richard’s on Richards on Saturday (May 10).