KEY POINTS:
The Bronx singer Matt Caughthran has one of those rare voices - it is strong and penetrating yet sounds as though it could fall apart any minute. When his Californian band play the Kings Arms tomorrow night get ready to hear a gravelly and sick shriek.
Guitarist and songwriter Joby J. Ford remembers the first time he heard Caughthran.
"He was playing this shitty club down in Huntington Beach, and I walked in and saw this guy with his shirt off and he jumped off the stage on to a table loaded with beer pitchers and it exploded all over these people and he let out this scream - this blood-curdling scream. I just said, 'I want to be a in a band with that guy'."
Following that wild night in the late 90s, the pair played in a number of bands together, then they started the Drips - a band comprising members of Los Lobos and the Distillers - and finally the Bronx came together in 2002.
The Bronx have released two self-titled albums, including last year's Bronx II with songs like the stroppy anthem Shitty Future and epic Oceans of Class, which showed there was more to this band than hardcore punk rock.
Ford says the next album will be different again and will be a double - the first a traditional Bronx record and the second in a mariachi style (a traditional Mexican music).
He says the mariachi sound has been seeping into his and Caughthran's songwriting thanks to the Spanish influence in Los Angeles.
"You know, you gotta go through 10 taco stands to get a cheese burger, but over the years, especially with touring and screaming every night, you start digging through music and finding things that are exciting. We've been listening to tonnes of music lately and it doesn't make sense for us to do [the mariachi album] but that's entirely why we're going to do it."
This time around the band will include a string section, a horn section and they will be playing traditional Mexican instruments, including the vihuela (a high-pitched, five-string guitar) and one guitarron (a small-scaled acoustic bass). "It's something else," he says.
For Ford, mixing musical styles is nothing new. He grew up listening to "everything" and played classical piano and drums in a marching band before getting into punk.
And he insists "if you go watch a 40-piece orchestra perform Rachmaninov then every single band in the world sucks".
"I'm such a fan of music that sometimes it's a curse because [generally] I think music is really boring and people are so concerned about selling records that it hampers creativity.
"So I don't really want to do stuff that everybody else does because they've already done it."
* The Bronx play the Kings Arms, Auckland, tonight.
* Albums: Bronx (2003); Bronx II (2006)
