We caught up with Polar Bear Club’s front man Jimmy Stadt to talk about experiences on the AP Fall Tour, crazy tour stories and their next record! Check out the interview below the cut and look out for PBC at Soundwave!

Since forming in 2005, you’ve gotten signed to Bridge 9 Records, released two full-length albums, played in the UK and were on this fall’s AP tour. What do you see for the band in the future? What do you hope to accomplish now?
That’s a pretty gnarly question.  We sort of, I mean our main goal for this band that sort of overshadows everything is to write music that we want to hear and that meets our standards.  So sort of our next year I guess we’re gonna be, well we’re writing now for our next full length, we’re going to go do Soundwave in Australia, come back and record that album and then from there just tour, tour, tour as much as we can in promotion of our next record!  We’re really a record to record sort of band, I don’t know how long we’re all going to be able to do this, we all want to do it as long as we can, we all love it but who knows when it will burn out, if it will burn out.

So you guys are going to Australia?
Yeah we’re going to Australia at the end of February to do Soundwave Festival.  It’ll be our second time over there and you know we’re from New York so winters are pretty rough so it’s good to leave in February, ‘cause that’s their summer.

You guys just recently wrapped up the fall AP Tour Fall Ball, how was that?
It was really cool!  It was a really different tour for us…I sort of consider that tour, just in terms of the crowd, it was really just sort of a Warped Tour but in the fall and inside.  It was more of a concert experience as opposed to like going to a hard core show.  We like that, I mean it’s cool.  We like playing on bigger stages you know we have more room to do our thing.  We played for so many people who would have never heard of our band.  We were playing for like 2,000 people a night average and all really young kids who are into getting into new music.  It was the ideal exposure tour for us.  Some crowds were more responsive to it than others but overall it was a big success because we won over a lot of young kids who will be going to shows for the next couple of years.

Which member(s) were you closest to from the other bands on the tour?
The overall sense of like companionship and camaraderie was across the board for everyone on this tour.  Normally when you do a tour with bands you don’t know it usually takes a couple days, maybe about a week to really get on the same page.  Just across the board from the crew to the bands to the tour managers to the merch people everyone was just really down to hang out.  We really deliberated a lot about taking this tour, we weren’t sure about it…it was kind of outside of our comfort zone.  We weren’t really sure what the crowd was going to be like or what they were going to think of it because we’re not really a band that is easily labeled.  You can’t really say “Oh Polar Bear Club is a heavy band” or “Polar Bear Club is a pop band” you can’t really say that without adding an aside.  So we weren’t sure how people were going to take it but we’re so glad we did the tour, at the end of it we were really sad.  That was a long tour, it was six weeks and that’s a pretty long run!  By the end it didn’t feel that long at all, we were really sad to say goodbye to everybody.

You know we’ve got to ask it… what’s your funniest or best tour story you have?
The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen on tour, it was in England, I was walking around after the show with Rob and Andy; we were walking to a bar and we walked past a strip club.  Out of the strip club comes literally, a giant…a man who is 7 foot plus tall and he is wearing a gray jumpsuit and he is handcuffed to a midget who was also wearing a gray jumpsuit.  The midget looks at us in passing and he points to the strip club and he does “don’t go in there man, it f***ing sucks.”  It was just the strangest most real moment I’ve had on tour.  I mean a lot of funny and crazy things have happened to me but that was the weirdest.

Do you have a favorite city to play in outside of your hometown in upstate New York?
There’s so many cities that I love to play.  It weird, it’s sort of different every time…I mean we’ve toured across the US maybe 6 or 7 times and when we first did it we’d get to a certain city and it’d be like ‘Oh San Francisco, that show was awesome, that’s going to be our go to city of awesome shows’ and then you come back next time or two times from then and it’s not the same.  There are definitely cities we love hanging out in, like Portland, we have a lot of friends there and we always have a great time in Portland.  But cities that we typically do well in would be like Toronto and most of the Northeast, some Florida cities really take well to us too, San Francisco is definitely a good city for us, San Diego just started to be good to us, and we did El Paso for the first time on this tour and that was really good.  It always changes and it always depends on the tour.  We’ve never played a good show in San Diego then we came through on the AP tour and it was awesome.  I love when we get to California, just because the drives are short and the cities are all really cool so that’s just a great place to hang out.  I think if you go to a city four or five times in a two year time span people sort of get bored of you as well unless you have a new album or something new to bring to the table.  The cities that we started out sucking in we now actually sort of do well in, it took those people a little bit longer to get into us.  The cities that we started strong in are maybe sort of waning a little bit because they’re used to us.

You all played in the United Kingdom with the Gaslight Anthem back in early 2009, how was the response to your band over there? Are there any things that are significantly different between playing in the US and in Europe?
We’ve been over there 5 or 6 times, we went over with Gaslight first which was great because it was a huge tour and that really set us up for the tours to follow.  We went over with Fear and went over a bunch of times doing festivals and just headlining and we went over with Title Fight.  We like going over there a lot, we have some good friends over there and the shows are typically pretty good.  It’s a little different in that America, in any major city you can go see three different shows in a week, and American bands that tour full time, you know if you don’t see them this time, you’ll see them in six month’s time.  I think kids here, myself included, are a bit pickier than they are in Europe and England…well maybe more mainland Europe, I think England is a pretty solid mirror of America in terms of shows, but in mainland Europe I think once you win over a certain city, those kids are with you until the end and no matter what they’re coming to all of your shows.

You’ve mentioned that you were going to take some time off to write/record a new record, any details on that?
We don’t have an album title or anything like that yet, a lot of the songs are written and sonically they are Polar Bear Club songs to me, but I know that people sort of generate differences from album to album as they listen to it and it’s going to sound different than all of our other albums.  I think the songs really do realm the spectrum of what Polar Bear Club is, a hardcore band, a rock band, a punk band, an indie band, whatever you think Polar Bear Club is.  I think we’re just becoming better songwriters as we do it more and learn more of what we like and what works.  We’re sort of taking this documentary, film making strategy to the album where we just wanna write as many songs as we can, record as many songs as we can and at the song pool just sort of pluck an album out of.

Is there anything else that you’d like to let the readers of the Back-Pocket Believers know?
I have absolutely nothing to promote right now!  If you’re in Australia and reading this then come see us at Soundwave!