A few things to be cleared up about Hope of the States, the much-hyped Brits playing their first Canadian gig tonight at Toronto’s Lee’s Palace:

1.) They think you’re underestimated. Rather than settling for “the lowest common denominator…the blandest of the bland,” frontman Sam Herlihy thinks mainstream audiences are ready for the demanding brand of quasi-prog rock on their debut disc, The Lost Riots. If Kid A could top the charts in the U.S., he reasons, there’s no harm in putting out an album that’s “not the kind of record you can just sit and listen to once and totally understand.”

2.) They’re not as obsessed with all things American as songs like 1776, George Washington and The Red, The White, The Black, The Blue might suggest. “The stuff I was interested in when we were writing these songs was this idea of the frontier spirit of these people traveling to the new world to set up this kind of pure society, and just how far that had fallen by the wayside,” Herlihy says. “And I think that’s the nature of many countries around the world, really.”

3.) They get “nervous” when they’re painted as a political band. “Not so much because we haven’t got anything to say, because we do,” Herlihy explains. “But in the songs, it’s more based around the personal political – the idea of just being one person stuck in a pretty unpleasant world these days.” For now, at least, they’ll leave specific issues to others.

4.) They’re not going to scale down their stage show just because they’re far from home. So the six-piece band will still be accompanied by the apocalyptic video projections that have become a trademark. “They’re pretty integral to the songs and how we want to put ourselves across,” Herlihy says. “I couldn’t imagine playing a show without them.”

5.) They think positive, even if it doesn’t always sound like it. “A lot of bands make absolutely amazing records, but they’re just miserable,” Herlihy says. “With us, I don’t think we did make a miserable record, or a specifically angry record… much as there’s up and down moments…there’s this core element of hope.”

6.) For a band with a violinist, they’re pretty tough. When guitarist Jimmi Lawrence hanged himself as the band was putting the finishing touches on The Lost Riots, they soldiered on. “We were lucky to have something so positive and something to put all our energies into, as opposed to sitting in a pub and turning into alcoholics and crying 24 hours a day,” Herlihy says. “Playing shows now and playing these songs that we worked on the six of us…is to me the most fitting tribute to him that we could ever give.”

Read the rest of the interview with Sam Herlihy here.