Craig Nicholls is standing on the lip of the stage of San Francisco’s famed nightclub Slim’s, eyes rolled back into his skull and mouth held open by a mighty Neanderthal wail. Sweeping his guitar above his head, he looks like he’s on the verge of keeling over. Instead, the final seconds of the blistering minute-and-a-half title track of The Vines’ debut album, Highly Evolved, come to a crashing close and the shaggy-haired singer tumbles off the platform, distractedly navigates his way through the assorted road crew who are hauling in equipment for tonight’s show, and promptly disappears through one of the exit doors. The members of the opening band, sporting uniform bowl haircuts and flared jeans, lean heavily on their unpacked instruments wondering whether they’ve just witnessed a soundcheck or an exorcism.

As The Vines’ sociable bass player Patrick Matthews moves downstairs into the band’s dressing room, he sounds frankly worried about Nicholls’ emotional state. “He has a bit of autism coming on, we think,” Matthews says. The pair met while they were both working at McDonald’s seven years ago. “He’ll be talking about something one minute and then suddenly he will start talking about something else that happened three months ago that only two people in the room might know about, then he'll start saying lines from The Kids in the Hall. He has all these compulsive association games going on in his head.”

Matthews thinks part of the problem is that the band has virtually been going nonstop since putting out its scorching seven-inch debut, “Factory,” in their native Sydney, Australia, at the beginning of last year. Shortly after its release, the self-financed EP was chosen as NME's “Single of the Week,” launching a major label bidding war that eventually landed them at Capitol and set the hype machine crackling.

When The Vines temporarily relocated to Los Angeles last summer to record Highly Evolved at the Sunset Sound studio complex, it was, by all accounts, an intensely painful ordeal. Existing primarily on fast food and living out of a shared hotel room, the group would work exhausting 16hour shifts, often coming close to blows with producer Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith). They had originally planned on staying just two weeks, but with Schnapf insisting on nothing less than perfection and Nicholls often doing up to 20 vocal takes for each song, the sessions spilled over into six months. In the process, the band lost its original drummer, David Olliffe, and attempted to replace him with Ringo Starr. The producer, meanwhile, became obsessed with creating the right studio environment by installing oil lamps, illuminated color wheels, and fairy lights in the room. Some days he would make the band work in complete darkness. Under the duress, the typically camera-friendly Matthews grew a stubby beard and put ona button-popping gut.

It didn’t take long for them to regain their pin-up looks—along with a new drummer, Hamish Rosser, and a second guitar player, Ryan Griffiths— but things are far from routine for The Vines. In the months since the album—part unhinged Stooges frenzy (“Outtathaway,” “Get Free”), part doe-eyed psychedelia (“Autumn Shade,” “Mary Jane”)—was completed, the band has fallen into a relentless schedule of playing live and doing promotions. As a result, they have developed a profound distaste for travel. “I would much rather be back in Australia,” Matthews says. “I lived in this place with my brothers in the middle of nowhere and we had a drum kit set up in the front room and we would just have these 24-hour jam sessions.”

It seems odd that he would find this more gratifying than playing in front of rapt crowds around the world every night. “I know,” he says, hanging his head. “You know how there’s one point in that Radiohead film, Meeting People Is Easy, where the bass player is talking to a journalist and he forgets what he’s saying so he just puts his head in his hands? I haven’t done that yet, but it’s getting to that point. Craig is at that point. He’s been doing four or five interviews a day, and I think he’s having trouble concentrating.”

When Nicholls is finally cornered a few days later, it’s obvious Matthews isn’t exaggerating. A simple greeting sends the sleepy-eyed frontman absentmindedly spewing out stock answers to questions he has addressed a million times before. He talks breathlessly about the recent spate of shows, touches briefly on the difficult recording process, mentions Nirvana’s clear but conflicted influence, and that he doesn’t mind getting lumped in with The Strokes and The White Stripes in the British press. It iS only when he stops to catch his breath that a precursory, “So, how are you doing?” can even slip out.

“I'm kind of losing it,” Nicholls says, in his oddly grating speaking voice. “And then I get it back for a while. And then I start slipping away. But I think my mental health was at its worse before we even started recording the album. My head was bursting with all of these ideas and I just wanted to prove to people that I wasn’t crazy; or that if I was crazy, I could at least record an album or two.”

His batteries physically run low the more he talks. He swears that he is going to take some time off in the near future to return to Australia and chill-out—no matter what becomes of The Vines. “There’s other things I want to do,” Nicholls says. He has considered becoming an artist or possibly a professional skateboarder. “I don’t want to be playing these songs in ten years. I hope our albums are still circulating, but this is just what I’m doing at the moment.”

It’s apparent Matthews has spent some time imagining this worse case scenario—that The Vines will self-destruct before they even have a chance to shine. “The way it will happen is we will be in the studio one day and Craig will start buttering his head and putting it between two slices of bread,” he says, with alarming sincerity. “There are days when we think we’re going to break up. We’ve never felt like a gang. We’re not like the Ramones. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach that Led Zeppelin Golden God phase.”