Just Riding the Wave

The first time was easy: the high-tension guitar riffs, a spare piano melody, the off-center rasp of singer-guitarist Hamilton Leithauser. It was the very first recording session for the Walkmen, their first moments as a band, and here it was already coalescing into something, a dark and playful song called “Wake Up.”

The sound was both raw and ethereal, where the Velvet Underground meets Radiohead. That was two years ago, and the result can be heard on the band’s debut album, “Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone,” which was finally released in March.

The live show came far less easily.

“At first we were really weird and we really didn’t play a good live show at all,” says Leithauser with a laugh. “And we were all really nervous. We just weren’t very good.”

The Walkmen, who perform Saturday at Spaceland, have since found themselves drawn into what many critics and fans are calling a New York rock renaissance, joining the Strokes and other bands there in a movement rooted in the sound of straight-ahead, old-school punk rock.

It’s an association that Leithauser, 24, has sometimes found distracting and annoying. His own reference points were actually Joy Division and Bruce Springsteen, an unlikely blend of punk despair and roots-flavored rock energy. But there was never any specific plan during the scattered, early-morning sessions for the album.

“That’s just the sound that we got when we started recording,” the singer says. “We have our own studio and it’s this really big room. We really didn’t know where they were going to go until they started to get recorded and we got to hear what they sounded like.”

But guitarist Paul Maroon sees an obvious benefit of the New York rock revival.

“It’s been incredibly helpful to us,” he says. “I don’t think anybody would care about our band if there wasn’t that thing going on. It’s been pretty darn lucky for us, as far as getting people to hear our record.”

That hasn’t always been a concern for Maroon. Like most of the Walkmen, he was once a member of the once-hyped but short-lived Jonathan Fire*Eater, a band whose brooding 1997 album on the DreamWorks label, “Wolf Songs for Lambs,” won over critics but few record buyers.

The band broke apart from internal discord less than a year after the release, and is now the source of endless jokes and derision within the Walkmen.

On stage, they perform no songs by Fire*Eater. Nor are there any requests. “I don’t think anyone liked our old band,” says Maroon, 28. “Our parents liked us.”

Like Jonathan Fire*Eater, the members of the Walkmen are all originally from Washington, D.C. Leithauser, a cousin of organist Walter Martin, was in a band called the Recoys. As those bands broke apart, its members returned to college, and it was two years before the Walkmen began to take shape.

From sessions recorded in the band’s own studio in New York, a pair of EPs and the debut were released by the tiny Star Time International label.

In recent months, the Walkmen have been approached by a variety of major labels. The Jonathan Fire*Eater experience was troubled, but Leithauser says the band was “treated like royalty.” Any hesitation comes from uncomfortable suggestions that the Walkmen adjust their sound, cleaning things up for mass consumption.

“We don’t like anything that’s overproduced or anything that sounds forced,” says Leithauser. “Or extraneous stuff that’s irritating.”

Either way, Leithauser says the Walkmen hope to have a new album recorded in their studio by the end of the year. Three new songs are already part of their set, along with a version of the Kinks’ ‘80s hit “Come Dancing.”

“We want to make it as soon as possible,” says Leithauser. “We don’t want to turn it into a bidding war. It’s just stupid. Basically, we want to be able to do the band full time by the time we do the next album. So we want to be able to do that and have complete creative control.”

Leithauser just left his job of four years with the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online operation. Now he can contemplate the band’s first European tour in the fall.

Meanwhile, he’s been listening obsessively to classic punk albums by the Ramones and Bad Brains, hoping to bring some of that speedy intensity to the Walkmen’s next album. But not too much.

“We’re not like that. We don’t play that fast,” he says. “I wish we could, but it would be ridiculous.”

The Walkmen, with Brandtson and Liars Academy, Saturday at Spaceland, 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., Silver Lake, 9 p.m. $8. (213) 833-2843.