Usually, when people call a band "the next Nirvana," that's the last you hear of them. Not these guys - Matt Diehl speaks to Craig Nicholls and Patrick Matthews.

What starts with a consonant, ends with the letters es and represents the future of rock? If you answered the Strokes or the White Stripes, you'd be correct--it this was 2001. In 2002, however, this honor goes to the Vines. After one of their raw demos zoomed up the charts in the U.K., this young Australian quartet found themselves as the new flavor of the month. The New Musical Express called them everything from the Australian Strokes to the perfect synthesis of the Beatles and Nirvana. The Vines' debut album, Highly Evolved (Capitol), justifies the hype: It's a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am tour de force of heady emotion, heavy guitars and more hooks than a tackle shop sells.

MATT DIEHL: The level of songwriting craft on your album is impressive. But, on the other hand, there's this unbridled tension. You get the feeling that the ship could tip over at any point. Do you feel that for :rock to be interesting it has to be on that edge?

CRAIG NICHOLLS: For me, it's always about that. While we were making our album, I was listening to the Kinks' album Sleepwalker. It has all these liner notes, and one note says it's 'music to live for." Nothing turns me on like rock music does. What's really important to me is that our music is about escape. It's controlled and it's not controlled, and it's got to be that half and half.

MD: Is rock 'n' roll a healing thing, or does it open the wound more?

CN: It's everything. It's emotional. It can be spiritual and mental. We're not trying to be negative at all and we don't dwell on that in the songs. There may be some elements of sadness in the songs, but that's real, that's honest. We want to make serious music. Listening to Beatles albums growing up--my dad had more than half of them--was something really cool to me. I wasn't into school a lot, and I didn't feel comfortable doing something just to get money. I wanted to create something, to give back to music. So I chose to devote my life to this.

MD: How do you feel about all the comparisons to the Strokes?

CN: I don't feel any way about it. I just saw them play for the first time a few weeks ago in Washington, and I thought their show was really great. Like them, we're a new band, and we have our own kind of songs--we're not 40 years old on our reunion tour.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: We were called the Australian Strokes because, like them, we put out these demos that were a bit rough. Yet the songs were there.

MD: You and Patrick seem to have a brotherly tension that informs the music.

PM: We have known each other for a very long time. I'm 26 now and I was 19 when we first played together, and Craig was 17. He should be my younger brother. I've got two younger brothers, and they defer to me. Craig should assume that role. [laughs]

MD: How did you get your very psychedelicsounding band name?

CN: My dad had a band in the '60s called the Vines, and I just thought it was a cool name. We were called Rishikesh before. It's the place in India where the Beatles went. It always got misprinted, like Rishi Chasm or something. The Vines sounds like guitar strings; it sounds like rain on trees. It sounds like a band. And my dad thought it was great.

MD: You two first bonded over music as teenagers working at McDonald's. Did your song "Factory" stem from that experience?

CN: Part of it. I was imagining a bored guy working at a factory in this gray type of world, doing the most mundane things imaginable. I always hated that, so I escaped with songwriting.

MD: Don't you think many of the people who will buy your records have to work in factories?

CN: Well, I did my time in McDonald's, too. The first verse is "Days are long, but the mind is strong in the factory."

MD: Much is made of the influence of Nirvana on the Vines, but you're also into Ryan Adams and Pete Yorn.

CN: Pete Yorn and Ryan Adams are like Nirvana--they're less heavy, but really universal, emotional, intelligent and serious.

MD: On your album, songs like "1969" and "Mary Jane" also show a real allegiance to psychedelia. Where does that come from?

CN: Our all-out personality. Listening to bands from the '60s--the Kinks, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix--you realize they were all about transcendence.

MD: Speaking of transcendence, tell me about the song "Get Free."

CN: "Get Free" is about doing what you want. It's a combination of strength and pain, fear and excitement. "Getting free" can mean anything, like sleeping in until three in the afternoon every day if that's what you want--that's getting free. For me, though, getting free is in the music.