At an age when most recent high-school graduates are either partying their way out of college or drifting aimlessly from one coffeehouse job to another, Cadien Lake James knows exactly where he’s headed.

“I have a lot of aspirations,” says the hyper-confident frontman for Twin Peaks, on the line from his parents’ house in the band’s hometown of Chicago. “I always get down on myself and go, ‘Man, I can’t write a song like “Imagine” by John Lennon or “Maybe I’m Amazed” by Paul McCartney. Those are huge-sounding masterpieces with great fucking lyrics.’ But then I’m like, ‘Those guys were 35 when they wrote those songs, so you don’t gotta beat yourself up, dude.’

“Ideally, we’d like to make a record like Exile on Main Street,” he continues. “That’s a great production job. It doesn’t sound pretentious, even though it’s obviously well-recorded. It has a real down-to-earth quality—like it’s lo-fi, but you can still hear everything, very much like a live performance.”

If you’re going take your best shot at a career in rock ’n’ roll, you might as well aim high, Exile being a lofty target. For now, Twin Peaks is off to a good start, the Windy City quartet’s debut album, Sunken, having lit up the blogosphere. Along with his pre-drinking-age-in-America bandmates—guitarist Clay Frankel, drummer Connor Brodner, and bassist Jack Dolan—James has crafted a record that bridges Jay Reatard and the Velvet Underground. Thrashers like “Out of Commission” suggest a band doing its best to OD on gloom-generation reverb, while the sunshine-soaked “Baby Blue” drifts back to Haight-Ashbury circa ’67. There are moments when the band comes on like a paisley-clothed version of the Pixies (“Boomers”), and times when it indeed seems bound for something grandiose in the future (consider the swooning strings at the beginning of the grimy rocker “Stand in the Sand”).

More than one reviewer has suggested that Twin Peaks would make a great touring partner for Smith Westerns. That connection is a fitting one, with James’s brother having sat behind the kit of that Chicago-based buzz band.

“He was their touring drummer, so I sort of closely watched their rise and how they did it,” James says. “I’ve always written and recorded songs right from third, fourth grade, so I knew I wanted to do the same thing.”

To that end, the singer ended up making a big decision a couple of years back. Along with two of his three Twin Peaks bandmates, he enrolled at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Friends dating right back to childhood, the three quickly decided they’d rather be sleeping on floors and spending hours in the tour van than studying.

“Not every parent of the band was happy about that,” James says, “but they’re all pretty supportive at this point, now that we’re getting some recognition.”

Predictably, that recognition inevitably dwells on the band’s name. Sorry, Laura Palmer fans—the members of Twin Peaks might have at one point gone to school near the places where David Lynch shot his cult television series, but they didn’t spend their weekends road-tripping from Olympia to Snoqualmie and North Bend.

Instead, they settled on the name completely by coincidence, which is believable considering they weren’t even born when the show first aired. Yes, given that they seem to know exactly where they want to be going, it’s easy to forget the members of Twin Peaks are that young.