One of the biggest irritations for bands is the media’s compulsion to pigeonhole, to label, to segment into genre and category. Reviews are far easier to write when handy tools such as “This sounds like X” or “If you like Y then you’ll love Z” are available.

For bands, it rankles - and rightly so, when the twelve or so songs they have laboured over are distilled down to buzzwords such as lit-rock, prog-folk and indie hip-hop.

Read as many articles as are available on the Californian band Why? and somewhere between 75% and 90% will use the words “indie” “hip-hop” and “folk” in close proximity to each other. It’s the pitfall of being original: having bizarre hybrid tags invented for your music.

In reality, Why? are none and all of these things. “I suppose we incorporate all those terms separately in some way,” says frontman Yoni Wolf, “We just do what feels natural for us. We also don’t have this filing cabinet of genre separation within us that journalists tend to have – that’s not a jab. We feel free to follow whatever idea or ideal might strike us and abhor the notion of fitting into some preset style. We are in a post-post-modern era after all, are we not?”
With two critically-revered records under their belt, Elephant Eyelash and Alopecia, Why? return to London in July ahead of the release of their third record proper (not counting EPs, solo records and tour-only releases).

Eskimo Snow is set to land in October and the advance word is hugely positive. The band entered the studio with the expanded line-up of Yoni, Josiah Wolf, Doug McDiarmid, Andrew Broder and Mark Erickson. “The sessions went well,” Yoni says, “The album was recorded more or less live with the five of us all playing at once.  We added a minimal amount of overdubs and redid vocals only if they were in dire need of it.  We wanted to stay true to the feeling of a band playing together in a room, so anytime there was a harmony to be sung, someone else did it rather than me singing over my own voice.”

The word on Eskimo Snow is that it’s a step away from the heavily hip-hop influenced sound of its predecessors, but this does not signify a major change in the band’s approach.

“We like to try something different with every record,” Yoni says, “I don’t think we are less interested in rap music than we used to be. On the contrary, I probably listen to more rap than ever. It’s just that there was a sound we were going for on this album that didn’t really involve rapping...if my current writing habits are any indication, the next album should be the most ‘rap’ out of anything we’ve done.  I guess I would say we follow impulse and work diligently to flesh it out thoroughly”

Why?’s lyrics have often made for a compulsively uncomfortable experience, Wolf using the songs as a no-holds-barred confessional. He bares his soul - sometimes in a chain of abstract non-sequiturs, sometimes in narratives that hinge on vivid imagery. A perfect example is the grim second verse of ‘Good Friday’ from Alopecia. “Mortaring your ear holes shut in a rush with wet coke / in a Starbucks bathroom with the door closed / On booze, I’m left in residue and confused / like the first time you used soft water / Down on my luck, caught unaware / Like Houdini when the last fist struck…”

The song unravels along with Wolf, the confessions turning darker and depraved. The protagonist is “sucking dick for drink tickets at the free bar at my cousin’s bat mitzvah” and “jerking off in an art museum john till my dick hurts / the kind of shit I won’t admit to my head shrinker / not even in a whisper to my own little sister.” It ends with a crushing blow: “I’d rather be dead than call this song ‘How I Lost Your Respect’ but God bless or get neglected and I’ll see you when the sun sets east, don’t forget me.” It’s heavy stuff and turns the listener into a witness, unable to turn away.

“Sometimes I think like a slide show,” Wolf says, “and sometimes it turns into a narrative. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of juxtaposed ideas that create a unique emotion when considered together.  I tend to follow where the writing takes me rather than come at it with some kind of outline. Although, I wouldn’t call it stream of consciousness, since there is a lot of editing and reworking involved.

“I would say that my lyrics are very close to my heart,” he continues. “Whether they are derived from my personal experience or someone else’s or are metaphors or fantasies. I have been blessed in my adulthood with little sense of embarrassment. Or at least, I am able to turn it off when I’m working. I guess I consider the truth of the art as more important than my fleeting feelings of shame or embarrassment.”

That said, it can’t be easy to repeat these words night after night in front of hundreds of people. “It is sometimes strange to listen back to something I wrote a few years ago and especially sing it night after night on tour. That can wear on your soul. I think the key is personality segmentation. You have to think of the writer (you) and performer (also you) as two different people. You have to sing your own songs night after night as if they are someone else’s and you are discovering the words in your mouth, as if for the first time, every time you sing them.”

There is also the cliché that good songwriters draw their most effective inspiration from misery. “I don’t think one needs to be unhappy to write,” says Wolf, “but a good song does have to have some kind of struggle in it – for the most part – just like a good movie or book or whatever.  Even if we are ‘happy’ as humans, whatever that means, we live with so many unanswered questions and have so much song running in our blood at all times if we just slow down to feel it.”

And for all the darkness and introspection of ‘Good Friday’ and its brethren on Alopecia and Elephant Eyelash, Wolf says: “The new record seems more introspective and darker than either of those two in my mind.  More solemn maybe. Not to say that it sounds like an Om record or some shit.  It still has a sense of humor.”

And for the uninitiated with enough sense to be at The Garage on 6 July 2009, Wolf reveals that a Why? show is not a dark, painful, live exorcism of emotional demons. “You’ll have some drinks, some burgers, some laughs. Maybe some cool lighting… A smoke machine, hopefully, even though it makes it hard for us to breathe up there.”