The Airborne Toxic Event borrows its name from the novel White Noise by Don Delillo. Published in 1984, the book foresaw a world consumed by media -- radio waves, billboards, television, advertisements -- all crowding waking hours, finding their way into dreams, subconscious thoughts, incoherent bits of static about Toyotas, Pepsi, manic depression, and the president. The Airborne Toxic Event is an enormous dark cloud, created by an explosion at a nearby chemical plant. In addition to the crowded airwaves, the cloud portends death, lingering at the edges of life, giving it meaning, urgency, something to fear. Such notions proved compelling to Daren Taylor and Mikel Jollett who formed the band in Los Feliz in 2006 based on a shared love of -- among other things -- the Cure, the Fall, and the Velvet Underground. “When I write a song,” says Jollett, the creative driver of the Californian five-piece, “I’m trying to get down an emotion, a scene or a setting. Everything important that happens after that happens between the music and the listener; the rest of it is all mythology. The collective interpretation of it is way more important than what I think.”

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There’s no reason to doubt the truth of that statement. Except that Jollett does do a lot of thinking (or over-thinking, as he himself would put it), and what he does, the way he spends his days, matters to him deeply. Besides, he’s had a lot to think about in the two years since the band’s debut album ambushed and enraptured fans with its captivating blend of literate, visceral indie rock and propulsive, anthemic choruses. That self-titled album which topped Billboard’s Heatseeker Chart for an astounding 8 weeks, found Jollett addressing the break-up of a relationship with a candour that was sometimes uncomfortable but always compelling. Two years on, Jollett’s priorities have shifted. On TATE’s stunning new album, All at Once, he and the band have a new urgency, a tighter cohesion and a fearlessness that is thrilling. Mortality, loss, the battle between the comfort of complacency and the need for change, the issues – both personal and political – that continue to draw individuals and nations into conflict the world over: these are big subjects, but Jollett doesn’t just dip his toe in the water. He dives right in.

“The album is basically a series of questions,” he explains, “which it sets out to answer. And the biggest is, ‘How do I spend my time? How do I live my life?’.” The death of three of Jollett’s grandparents while he was absent owing to touring commitments was the catalyst for this self-examination. “The first [title] track is basically saying: okay, this is how it goes – you’re born like this, you live like this; what are you going to do with that?”. He is not, he says, disowning the sentiments he expressed and the heartache he addressed on the first record. It’s more that, having been given such a sharp and painful reminder of the passing of time and the never-ending duality of life and death, he resolved to dig a little deeper than he had before, and look those conundrums straight in the eye. “My grandparents’ deaths changed a lot of what I thought about what was going on in my life. Seen from a longer view, things like breaking up with a girlfriend, you do suddenly go, ‘Okay, that’s part of life, kiddo’. It happens to people. And death, too; yes, it’s tragic, but it’s also just part of it. My father’s mum was 97 and she died in her bed, in a house filled with people who loved her. All those questions the record asks – at the end, the only answer I could come up with was, ‘It’s probably a good idea to love other people’.”

Talking to Jollett, listening to All at Once, you sense that this is the record he was always meant to make. Loss inspired it, but writing and making it proved celebratory and revelatory. The unifying theme, Jollett says, was “the idea that life happens on many levels; that you don’t really live inside of evolving events, but in the sort of quiet, moribund moments in between the massive moments of change. And that change happens suddenly and all at once – and that that is true on a personal level, on a cultural level, on a political level”. These are big themes. On All at Once, Mikel Jollett, Stephen Chen, Noah Harmon, Anna Bulbrook and Daren Taylor look them squarely, fearlessly, in the eye, grapple with them, wrestle them to the floor. “We had this sense,” Jollett concludes, “where we knew that people were going to hear this record, and we didn’t have that with our first one. You sort of have this moment where the world is there and you have this opportunity to say something.” The Airborne Toxic Event have taken that opportunity, and risen to that challenge. Now it’s over to us.