Pains of Being Pure at Heart Copy the Strokes for New Single

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's new single, 'Heart in Your Heartbreak,' is more than just a catchy pop song: it gets to the, well, heart of what the band is all about.

"It's one of those very traditional feelings that roots pop songs, which is getting dumped and then reflecting on it and feeling bad about it," singer Kip Berman tells Spinner. "But the song ultimately evolves in that you realize that there's no point in feeling bad about it because it wasn't that great in the first place. It's almost like it indulges in a kind of bathos, in that it's very maudlin up until the bridge, when it sort of lyrically shifts around."

Listen to 'Heart in Your Heartbreak'
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Heart In Your Heartbreak by forcefieldpr

To Berman, that shift is what separates the kids from the grown-ups.

"It's really important that our music doesn't exist solely on this purely sensational, 15-year-old level," Berman says, laughing. "Those feelings are legitimate, and I still feel the 15-year-old way, but it's also good to feel the young-adult way, where you have experiences and you can base your understanding of the world on them. Otherwise, it's just forced naïveté, which is antithetical to the music we enjoy. We're an indie-pop band, sure, but we don't celebrate this unnatural sense of wanting to be 12-years-old forever."

The song was one of the last the foursome wrote for its new album, 'Belong.' As Berman says, sorting out emotional issues wasn't the only motivation behind writing 'Heart in Your Heartbreak.'

"We wanted to have a song that sounded like the Strokes, so we wrote a song that sounded like the Strokes," he cracks.

More than who they sounded like, though, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart were concerned with what they sounded like.

"We wanted it to sound like who we are and not what our record collections are," Berman says. "In a lot of ways, our first record was very much through the lens of our lifelong interest in independent music, like Scotland and also American indie-pop in the '90s."

'Belong' is due March 11 from Slumberland.