100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #59 We Are Scientists – Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt

Released: 2005

2005. The Brookylinite/Lower East Side, meet-me-in-the-restroom boppers were either played out, in rehab or sizing up any escape route they could find. And then along came these blow ins from, of all places, Californ-i-ay, the place where being hip went to die and ordered itself a chai latte in the process. We Are Scientists? more like We Are Four Years Too Late, man.

And yet, here they were with an Ariel Rechtshaid-produced first “serious” record, entitled With Love And Squalor, it’s candour elbow sharp and bruised-kneed, the suntanned perps who made it wide eyed and yearning for a piece of anything. Some wrote it off, like putting a kitten inside a bag, but it’s millennial unease and relentless pace struck a chord with people wanting to do things they shouldn’t but not finding anyone to do them with.

Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt opened the record up, it’s desperate guitars sounding like they were trying to climb ten flights of stairs after too many pills. The lyrics weren’t about a stick up, more a literal metaphor about trying to dissuade someone who’d expressed a new preference from screwing someone else. On they scrambled, through track after track, attaching jumper cables to the whole thing: racing to the bottom had rarely sounded so great. ‘The Scene is Dead’, they then proclaimed on a later track, having just proven the complete opposite.