Chop Suey Presents Them Hills (feat. members of Broken Bells, Hella, Phosphorescent)

Them Hills (featuring members of Broken Bells, Zavalaz) released their
forth-coming third album “Rad Disguise” today along with official
video for the single "Life Savers". The band will tour the West Coast
Tour in September.

The bi-costal Them Hills features the talents of guitarist/singer Dan
Elkan, bassist Thaddeus Stoenner, drummer David Torch, and new
guitarist Justin Hunt.

During the first week of January 2010, Elkan and Stoenner convened at
their warehouse space outside of Nevada City, California to begin
writing new songs. Elkan had just come off a year of performing as a
guitar player/backup singer for Dangermouse and James Mercer's
project, Broken Bells and Torch had moved to New York City to work for
the Times as a photographer. Elkan and Stoenner, found themselves
without a drummer or a recording budget and very little time to work
together, so the pair scraped together a few microphones and reference
monitors and began brief and sporadic demo sessions, which would
ultimately become “Rad Disguise”.

In between these sporadic recording sessions the band was busy with
personal and other professional projects. Stoenner has performed with
several local groups including his band Black Bear. Elkan relocated to
Los Angeles and is a current member of Zavalaz (featuring Cedric
Bixler-Zavala from At the Drive-In and Mars Volta) and has performed
live with Broken Bells, Kim Deal, That Dog & Hella and has appeared on
recordings by Kim Deal, Hella, Team Sleep (featuring members of the
Deftones), Norah Jones and Zach Hill (Death Grips).

Demos were written and recorded simultaneously using programmed beats
of old drum machine samples. The original intention was to re-record
the songs with live drums later, but being pleasantly surprised with
the results and instead of re-recording the songs with the possibility
of losing that initial "demo magic", the decision was made to leave
the songs as they were, jagged, raw and immediate.