When the Airborne Toxic Event took the stage at Spaceland in Silver Lake on January 31st of this year, the 400-capacity venue was a madhouse. In the entryway, patrons squeezed in and pled their cases to the door girl. Another 400 people queued impatiently along the sidewalk outside, forming a massive line that snaked down Silver Lake Boulevard, surrounding the venue on all sides.

Influenced by the postmodern writer Don DeLillo's novel White Noise, the band took its name from a section of that book in which the main character is exposed to an enormous chemical explosion—dubbed "the Airborne Toxic Event"—and is forced to confront his fear of death.

Some bands grind it out for years before they find a following and then some bands are seemingly big from the start. When the Airborne Toxic Event arrived at the Echo in Echo Park to play their first show, they were greeted by a crowd of more than 200 people. They had sent scratch recordings to the local blogs before their first show and the local blog press took to it immediately, lauding the band for its odd mix of intense, literary songwriting, angular guitar riffs and powerhouse rhythm section. What followed was a year of steady ascent: bigger and bigger shows, trips up and down the West Coat to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, two trips to New York, a trip to the UK. The national blog press began to take notice of their debut self-released EP, Rolling Stone named them one of the top 25 bands on MySpace, The Los Angeles Times, in its year end wrap-up, called them the band to watch in 2008 (an honor which, in its previous two years, had gone to Cold War Kids and the Silversun Pickups).

The band quickly developed a reputation for energetic live shows, reaching the usually stoic East Side L.A. indie rock crowd on a gut level. Many danced. Some cried. Sing-alongs became the norm. Harmon played his bass with bow like a cello while Taylor pounded away on a car hood taken from a junkyard one afternoon. It was not uncommon for the band to throw thirty tambourines into the crowd or for Harmon or Bulbrook to jump into the fray among a chorus of handclaps as Jollett wailed from the stage while the audience wailed back.

The self-titled debut record, the end-product of these two madcap years of tragedy and excitement, blood, spit and tears, will be out August 5th.