The Thrills: How to thrill me

Bono's favourite new band have had an NME cover - but no album as yet. Clare Dwyer Hogg meets The Thrills

The Thrills have friends in high places. For their first UK gig, they supported Morrissey, at his request; Bono has also given his support; the NME has put them on the cover and carried features on them. And the Dublin band haven't even released an album yet.

"The thing is," says Daniel Ryan (guitar and bass), "we've read the NME for years, so we've seen them do this with loads of bands. A lot of the time, the band don't even have a record out, and when the record comes out, it's a different story. Some of them are brilliant, and some of them are awful." They aren't predicting that their album will be bad news, but they are already wary of believing their own hype. "We're well aware of the fact that in a month they could be slating us," Ryan continues.

The NME itself has been slated recently for its reporting of bands – in January, for instance, Time Out ran an article joking that, these days, anyone who can hold a guitar the right way up is heralded as part of the new-rock revolution. But The Thrills take everything with a big, laid-back, Irish pinch of salt.

"It is great that it happened – we sold out our last tour, and it's probably why we got single of the week on Jo Whiley's show," Ryan says. "For those kind of reasons, we look on it as a really good thing, so we're going with it for the moment." So the band are concentrating on developing their album and dispelling a few myths that have already been propagated despite the recentness of their arrival on the scene.

The first story that has done the rounds is that Bono said he'd carry their bags if they made the album a good one. That, an off-the-cuff comment, has been picked up and given mileage in virtually every article written about them since. "He may want to have a word with us now – he may not be happy," Ryan laughs. What impressed the boys when they met him, though, was Bono's vision. "He talked about how much it meant to travel and hear your music – to go to Japan and play a gig; to hear your song on the radio there or hear it on in the middle of America – that's what it was about for U2. It wasn't about getting in the NME and getting over to London – it was all around the world."

This resonates with The Thrills because their inspiration comes more from the US than Ireland. They wrote most of the songs for their album on the West Coast, and when they were signed by Virgin, the album was recorded in LA. It was produced by Tony Hoffer, a familiar name in this scene, who gives the band a credibility beyond Bono and Morrissey. Beck and Air have both used Hoffer as a producer. "He understands all your influences but he can help you pull them in a bit of a more modern way to give them flavour," says Padraic McMahon, who also plays guitar and bass.

That is an important quality – a constant refrain from the group is that they are not a retro band. They have to say that, because some of their major influences are unabashedly retro: Crosby Stills and Nash, Neil Young, The Beach Boys, Burt Bacharach, Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan. But they also love The Flaming Lips (the lead singer has something of Wayne Coyne about his vocals), The Coral and Super Furry Animals, so it's an eclectic mix. "What we're trying to do," says Conor Deasey, the front man, "is take different influences together, whisk them up and try to twist them in a way. The Stones do it; everyone does it – it's like a food chain. As long as, somewhere along the way, we try to do something different."

By the time they were signed, the band had had plenty of time to develop – they had been together through school and college, none of them had played for anyone else, and they had already been signed to an independent label in Ireland. That didn't work out, but the experience kept them from rushing into a deal without thinking. They relocated to the States to write; when labels started to show interest, they held out for six months to get the deal they wanted.

"I think," says the drummer, Ben Carrigan, "we could be open to abuse in the future: people accuse you of deserting your roots if you don't follow the beaten path. But we've always tried to do our own thing."

The single 'One Horse Town' is out on Virgin on 10 March. The Thrills tour later this month. Their debut album is due in June