Naked & Famous

Only two studio albums into their career, New Zealand alternative rock band The Naked and Famous is set to embark on a stadium tour that will bring them to The Forum in Inglewood on Feb. 14.

The band will be opening for Imagine Dragons, another alternative band whose meteoric rise to popularity has turned heads over the past year.

Not bad for The Naked and Famous, a band that lead singer Alisa Xayalith described as being “really poor” in 2006 when they first started recording in Auckland, New Zealand.

“We all had day jobs,” Xayalith said of the band during its early days. “We would go to our jobs, roll into the studio, stay up till 3 a.m., get up again at 6 a.m., go to work and then go back to the studio. We sacrificed a lot to work, write and record. That kind of ethos hasn’t changed for us.”

The band used the momentum from these early recordings to put out its first bona fide hit: the glistening synthpop gem “Young Blood,” which topped the charts in their native New Zealand and brought the band international attention.

“Young Blood,” in addition to the band’s follow-up single “Punching in a Dream,” is exactly the sort of polished anthem that typically fares well in the stadium and festival settings the band will be facing in the coming months.

Among these dates are appearances at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which the band will play at both of the festival’s two weekends.

“We play all the hits,” Xayalith said. “At a festival we have to remember that people aren’t just there to see us — they’re there to see a whole bunch of different bands — so we really try to pick songs with the power to draw people in.”

This isn’t to say that The Naked and Famous isn’t a band lacking in touring experience. The band has maintained a rigorous touring schedule over the past few years that has taken them to the United States several times in the past, including in 2013 when they arrived in Los Angeles to record their sophomore album, In Rolling Waves.

Despite the change in locale, Xayalith said its effect on the music has been negligible, adding that the decision to move to Los Angeles was arbitrary.

“I’m more concerned about my interior world than my environment,” she said. “Your imagination is limitless, whereas your environment is limited.”

In Rolling Waves was released last year and spawned the singles “Hearts Like Ours” and “A Stillness.”

The band rose to popularity in 2010, a time when interest in synthpop had reached a feverish high following the success of bands such as Passion Pit and MGMT.

The album’s glimmering production and strong melodic sensibilities pushed the band into new emotional territory. This was best reflected in its new album’s cover art, a monochromatic gray image of a fragmented flower.

Compared to the bursting color from their first album’s cover, this image suggests a change in the band’s lyrical and sonic territory.

Highlights include recent single “I Kill Giants,” about the death of Xiyalith’s mother, and the woozy pared-down number “Grow Old,” each of which brings a healthy dose of melancholy to the colossal melodies bursting in the bands’ choruses.

In Rolling Waves feels removed from all the hype and comparisons to their contemporaries. It feels personal, like the type of album that would’ve existed with or without the current musical landscape weighing on the band.

Xayalith said she prefers not to think actively about other musicians while working on songs, but noted that she listened to EMA and Apparat while recording the album.

Even though the band was named after a lyric expressing ambivalence to fame by the British rapper Tricky, Xayalith was anything but ambivalent.

“We’re extremely grateful that we get to live this lifestyle,” she said. “As long as The Naked and Famous exists we’re going to focus on our creativity. If it stops becoming about that, we’d quit the band.”

And for any Trojans looking to follow the band’s path into the music industry, Xayalith advises focusing on songwriting.

“What does it come down to? Work on songs,” she said. “Taking everything else out, just work on songs and make sure they’re good. The packaging — how you decide to dress it for the world — is kind of the easy part.”