When we weren't on tour, Noam drove the Merritt Parkway down to Brooklyn every weekend to spend 10 hour days in our rat-friendly corner of The Saltmines Dumbo rehearsal complex. Our neighbors: The Walkmen, French Kicks, and a formidable number of metal bands. We worked our assess off. It’s my favorite MB record.

As always, there were bumps in the road. In the middle of mixing, our initial engineer vanished into a substance and/or mental health episode. Murky dealings on the business side meant we were now on two labels (?) but also sort of just one (?). And we had a byzantine courtship with the suits at Columbia Records, who ultimately chose to sign MGMT instead. (Clearly a smart move! Also, friends of ours from college.)

Heaven came out and we set off on an endless tour. The album got quite a bit of press, a list of which reads like a funeral for mid-2000’s culture magazines: Details, Magnet, GQ, Esquire, The Onion, Filter, Harp. Two months in, seemingly everyone had weighed in... everyone but the blog lords at Pitchfork. One misty morning in Chapel Hill, NC we woke up, turned on our (flip) phones and learned just how much good momentum a really bad Pitchfork review could halt (answer: a lot!). From an 8 to a 3 in two short years: baby, we rode the Pitchfork pump ‘n dump hype machine at its fearsome apex.

The touring cycle around Heaven was great, if somewhat brutal -- 120 shows over 9 months, playing alongside Matthew Dear, Editors, Cut Copy, Black Kids, Tokyo Police Club and many others. With our album advance, we bought a gold Chevy E-350, just one year old and freshly liberated from a rental car company. From the perspective of a small touring band, this was unassailable progress.

Noam immediately built The Vault, a plywood box-within-a-van outfitted with a huge hockey puck lock. Our precious gear would be forever safe in the sketchy motel parking lots and ill-lit city streets of America. We upgraded the stereo and removed unnecessary benches (the benefits of being a trio). We named her the Gold Standard.

It’s hard to fathom now, but we toured the world with flip phones (and eventually Peter’s state of the art and borderline useless Palm Treo). Our daily existence was ruled by printed-out MapQuest directions, Super 8 hotel brochures and a game-changing “trucker bible” that listed the restaurants and services available off of every exit on the American highway system.

Our first tours of England and Europe behind Heaven were even more fly by night, including one Big Ass Tour opening for our friends in Editors, where we found ourselves playing for many thousands of people in UK soccer arenas, brutalist German halls, and a bullfighting ring in Portugal. For two surreal months, we trailed behind the Editors’ buses in our tiny Vauxhall hatchback rental. By the end of the year, we were as good a live band as we would ever be. (Ben)