Vancouver drum-guitar duo Japandroids is experiencing an unexpected media blitz after its song “Young Hearts Spark Fire” turned up in Pitchfork’s On Repeat section on January 9. The influential Web site hails the band’s “equal parts insolence and grandeur”, comparing the track’s “doomed-romantic” quality to the Constantines. Vocalist-guitarist Brian King told the Straight that Pitchfork simply dropped the band an e-mail. “They check to make sure it’s okay to post one of your songs,” he said. “They don’t tell you how they got it or heard about you, or if they’ve seen you live. I wish I had a better story, but we don’t really know how this happened.”

The pair is enjoying the attention, but King also thinks it’s “sort of ridiculous”. “That we jumped from being an unsigned Vancouver band who plays at the Cobalt to having our picture on the front page of Pitchfork is, to us, so absurd,” he said. “I remember when we got our first review in Exclaim!, we thought that was ridiculous too.”

“Young Hearts Spark Fire” is from the forthcoming album Post-Nothing, set for release this spring.