The Bravery’s Sam Endicott says he’s been going through a phase where all he listens to is Deep Purple

When Sam Endicott hooks up with me from his home in New York City, the frontman for the Bravery is feeling “a little loopy” from being up all night working on B-sides. The tracks are from sessions for the band’s upcoming album, The Sun and the Moon, which is a follow-up to the ’80s-indebted dance-rockers’ self-titled 2005 debut.

The new disc, set for release on May 22, was produced by Brendan O’Brien, but the famed knob-twiddler wasn’t around to give his blessing to the secondary material.

“He’s strictly A-side,” quips the tuckered-out Endicott without a hint of concern. The 29-year-old was just happy to have access to O’Brien’s Midas touch, which has graced albums by the likes of Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen. The producer’s encyclopedic knowledge of rock ‘n’ roll equipment was welcome, too.

“The first day I met with him, we were just hangin’ out and I put on ‘Satisfaction’, and I was like, ‘Man, this is such a great guitar sound.’ And he just goes, ‘Well, it was this kinda guitar, and this kinda amp, and this kinda foot pedal, and I have them all in my basement.’ So he brought them all up and plugged ’em in and just re-created the sound.”

The Bravery didn’t end up using Keith Richards’s immortal guitar tone on The Sun and the Moon; its members found other ways to make the disc a departure from their more synth-based debut. Much of The Bravery sounded like Robert Smith doing the beaches of Rio with Duran Duran.

While Endicott hasn’t entirely got over his Smith fixation, the new disc’s “Every Word Is a Knife in My Ear” is faithful to the founding tenets of power pop, while the loping bass lines and sweeping steel of “Bad Sun” suggest the Bravery somehow stumbled on the Meat Puppets’ Up on the Sun.

“We wanted to try a lot of new sounds and textures,” reports Endicott, whose band plays the Commodore on May 14, “so we just used whatever we had access to. We tried vintage keyboards and Mellotron and steel guitar, and we had, like, a string section on one song.”

The members of the Bravery came together in New York in 2001, and during the group’s infancy Endicott–along with guitarist Michael Zakarin, keyboardist John Conway, bassist Mike H, and drummer Anthony Burulcich–spent long hours hanging around Manhattan’s Tower Records, giving away copies of their self-burned CDs to passersby.

The street-corner self-promotion eventually led to a signing by powerhouse Island Records, and–thanks to a growing appetite for ’80s-inspired bands like the Killers and the Stills–international hits with “An Honest Mistake” and “Unconditional”.

Judging by live footage shot two months ago in Austin, Texas–currently available for viewing on MSN Sympatico Control Room–the Bravery’s new material is heading in a rockier direction than the disco-y mirror-ball blather of “An Honest Mistake”. That would be in keeping with Endicott’s surprisingly old-school musical preferences.

“I’m kinda bad about listening to new music,” he admits. “I listen to a lot of old stuff, classic rock. And recently I’ve been going through a phase where all I listen to is Deep Purple. We don’t sound anything like Deep Purple, but I just love it. I don’t know, it’s weird.”