With a three-night run in Irving Plaza in New York City, three-piece LANY are definitely ones to watch. An impressive feat for anyone, the three-piece are still totally humble, kind, and understandably excited. With no airs and graces, Paul Klein, Jake Goss and Les Priest sat down with GoldenPlec to discuss their debut album, how they built up their fanbase and moving from Nashville to L.A.

Their debut self-titled full-length was released in June, and Klein explains how their previous EP releases built up to this debut. “There’s some songs on there that are over a year old. We’ve always been on tour or writing. We’ve always been working towards a debut. Like, we put out a ‘kinda’ EP with songs that could have potentially have been on a debut but we wanted to put them out. But there were songs on ‘kinda’ that at the same time made it onto the debut. It was a writing process of about 16 months."

Last year the band also had an intense touring schedule, and it's only gone up in 2017. "We played 117 shows last year and are playing 135 this year." Hence why it took a little more time to finish the album. "We write all of our own songs, so it’s not like people are pitching us songs that we can just record."

However, with all this time on the road, LANY express how difficult it can be to write on the move. "Creating on the road is fine, " says Goss. "But as far as getting things down – that’s hard. We’ve only written one song on the road. It’s really hard to do." Inspiration can come at any time. Say one of them is improvising during soundcheck and they like it – it all gets stored up, so when LANY finish touring they have a lot of material to work with.

Since the release of ‘LANY’, the band have already noticed a shift in their shows. As Klein explains, "we’ve only played 10-11 shows since releasing it in America, so we’re playing the full-set. Our audience has changed, it feels a little bit more grown… It has expanded, for a while it was just young people and now it’s like a lot of young people but now there’s like…. some dudes!" The band have addressed the fact that they have a lot of young female fans in previous interviews, saying that it doesn't bother them because in some ways it's the most real, unadulterated love – not influenced by what's "cool" or not, so they are not trying to disrespect that element of their fanbase by saying this, as Klein is quick to clarify. "The first four rows [will be mostly younger girls] and they give me so much life. But it’s also cool to see some diversity in the crowd. When you have songs like ‘Hericane’ and ‘Tampa’ – these are songs that carry a lot of emotional weight and they’re a bit different from our typical ‘LANY Love song’ and it really adds something different."

When it came to writing this different type of song, it just happened naturally, they weren't trying to reach another demographic. "I’ve never sat down to write a sad song," Klein explains. "I just write straight from the heart, it just talks about real-life, it’s about being a human being."

Going back to the inception of LANY, the trio were each writing and creating individually, with Priest and Goss in Nashville and Klein in L.A. However, they explain that coming together everything just clicked. "I think that’s why we’re here," Goss explains, "because it happened just like that we were like... This is going to be something. Let’s go with it!" And "going be something" it was. "We wrote and recorded our first two songs in the four days we had together and put them on the internet," Klein explains. A week later they already had a fanbase.

From there the growth was steady, if perhaps also a little slow. "A lot of times I just want to blow up overnight,” says Klein. “But, if you just blow up it’s like, well what’s next?"

Klein explains, "everything about LANY has been steady, gradual. We don’t have a video that’s gone viral on the internet, we don’t have a song on the radio, so selling out three nights at Irving Plaza is just because people like the music."

"I think that’s how you create longevity too, " adds Priest. “Slowly building a base."

Nashville has an incredibly music history, "But in 2014 when we were making LANY songs we were doing it very differently to how everyone makes music in Nashville" says Klein. "Nashville has so many studios and so many great players and they have this system, this formula – these are what the songs should sound like – Nashville has a sound. We just, honestly, did the opposite."

They just set up in a living room and wrote and recorded there. "But now, in 2017, there’s probably a lot of people doing that, doing it on their computers, on their phones even." Even in Nashville, the industry is changing.

After relocating to Los Angeles, LANY still see themselves on the fringes. “It’s just us,” says Klein. “I’m just starting to learn about the music industry. I don’t feel we know too much about it, we write our stuff, we play our stuff, we mix our stuff."

LANY are already planning their next steps, booking off time next year to write and record. For the time being, the band are set to be touring for the rest of the year – playing The Grand Social on 10 December. Having played three nights in Irving Plaza (with a capacity of over 1000), the band’s debut Irish show looks set to be a rare opportunity to catch LANY before they move on to bigger venues on this side of the pond.