Girls — the band, not the gender — hit the indie-rock world hard this fall, with critics raving over both their intriguing story and the troubled power-pop anthems that make up their debut release, Album.

Frontman Christopher Owens’ songs have a profundity that belies their upbeat, accessible exterior, not to mention that his personal story is one for the books: He spent his childhood as a member of the “Children of God” cult and constantly moved from place to place before escaping at age 16 to Texas. It wasn’t until a wealthy benefactor took Owens under his wing and set up him up in San Francisco that Owens befriended Chet “JR” White, and the two started recording music for what would become Girls.

Since Album’s release in September, it has received lots of attention for its sunny, jangly sound, beachy lo-fi guitars and moody lyrics, including a rare 9.1 out of 10 from Pitchfork Media.

The band is bringing their music on the road to D.C. this Tuesday night, Nov. 3, at the Black Cat, and The Guide sat down with White recently to discuss the artist’s process and the upcoming show. Be sure to check out Girls — get your tickets now so you can say you “knew them when.”

I have read a lot about your story and Christopher’s story, as being one of the great stories of rock ’n’ roll even though you guys are pretty new on the scene. Can you talk about this?

Whoa. Well, I guess the band is sort of vaguely interesting. We just started writing songs; both of us were just kind of at the point where we were trying to find some sort of creative outlet for our lives, so we started writing songs, playing songs ,and [Owens] basically asked me to help him record the songs I liked, and we just started working on the songs and recording the songs. Originally, unfortunately, the set [we had] wasn’t working well … so we went out and bought a reel-to-reel machine and basically for the next year off and on — we weren’t recording constantly by any means; we had weeks between recording — we just would work on these songs. The whole album was done without any sort of idea of releasing it or [getting] any attention [from] it; it was just two people just for fun, making recordings of these songs after work pretty late at night to early in the morning the next day.

What sort of influences informed your sound when you and Christopher first started recording?

I think that you automatically draw from everything that has affected you in your life. The biggest influence came from the actual songs, for me, because I would hear them in the really rough form, because Christopher used to play them on acoustic guitar and then I’d hear them. The first or second time he’d play it — it’s like, even now it’s usually instantaneous, like I can sort of get a picture of where and what he was influenced by. Just from his songwriting and the way it sounds to me, like he plays it and then we’ll sit and kind of talk about that, and talk about what instruments I’ll play here, what I can hear happening, usually. Honestly, it’s always the influence of the song itself.

How does that dynamic translate to your live show? What can we expect from Girls live?

Our live show is like a complete different thing for us. When you record, you control everything and you have a choice as to what you’re presenting to people, and you have an endless amount of time if you want to fix things and make them right. And the live shows are at this point with two other people. It’s been a real hard process getting used to that, I guess, to share your songs and give them to other people to play. And probably we’re hard for other people to play with us sometimes, because we have a clear idea, and it’s hard for us to let people deviate from that and do what they want when we play live.

The live show, it just sounds different … they have different constraints that make it what it is. For us now, we’re more of a straight four-piece rock band for the live show. I think that we kind of always had it in our heads that eventually we’d do something a little more — just something bigger — but then again, we always liked the idea of being a band that changes every once in a while, when you don’t see them maybe after a couple years you’re never quite sure how the presentation could be, you know? … Bands kind of do different things during the record — the thing that lives, the thing that is forever.

[For the live show, it’s good if] if you find the right people. Like, our guitar player was doing a European tour at the time — he’s really great, we like him — but he realized he doesn’t want to ever tour ever again, so … (laughs). We’re leaving for New York on the 1st, and we have a whole new band rehearsing with us; it’s pretty scary and kind of exciting. It’s gonna be interesting.

Yeah, I bet. So just to talk about the record a little bit, you said you were just making this music for fun; did you expect this big response and all of this attention?

I don’t know, I don’t think anyone ever really expects it to happen, I mean especially from the way this was done, but we had a very weird self-assurance of what we were doing. Maybe that’s just the idea that as long as it’s something that you like doing, that if you believe in it, it doesn’t matter, you know? I don’t know. We were just kind of irrationally really self-assured of the whole thing.

Where did the band name, Girls, come from?

It’s a boring story, actually; just one day Christopher was in this band called Curls, and he was trying to play it in a different format … and I said I like the name Curls, so we sat there for maybe 10 minutes before deciding to call it Girls, because it sounded like Curls.

And the album, which is simply Album?

Yeah, also we were just trying to come up with album ideas and we weren’t happy with any of the ideas we were coming up with, so we were messing around with album art a lot on the computer, for the cover, and we couldn’t agree on what to call it so we just wrote the word “album” in the place where we wanted the title to be, and kind of ended up liking it … all of the different album cover ideas just had the word “album” on them, so we were like, “Why don’t we just call it Album?” … And it kind of looked like a photo album.

Catch Girls performing songs from their debut release, Album, at the Black Cat this Tuesday night, Nov. 3. The Black Cat is located at 1811 14 St. NW, easily accessible from campus on the G2 bus.