'A Certain Innocence To The Whole Thing': Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Reflect On 20 Years Since Their Groundbreaking Debut
It's hard to look back at the indie rock scene of the mid 2000s without at least a passing mention of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
For many, the Alec Ounsworth-founded project was compulsory listening for any music-lover who believed themselves to have a finger on the pulse of the semi-underground music scene. For others, it was the soundtrack to an era in which New York City-based acts dominated the discussion of indie rock.
For Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, their story began back in 2003 when the Philadelphia-born Ounsworth started to share his own music in the public sphere. Forming a band which included drummer Sean Greenhalgh, keyboardist Robbie Guertin, and guitar and bass-playing brothers Lee and Tyler Sargent, the newly-minted outfit set to work honing their sound amongst shows across the north-eastern portion of the US.
This slow rise to fame was the public-facing aspect of a growth that saw Clap Your Hands Say Yeah writing and recording myriad songs which would later make up their eponymous debut album in June 2005.
Recorded for just a few thousand dollars, the album was indie at its core – DIY, occasionally lo-fi, and full of promise – and slowly found an audience thanks to tastemakers the world over. Ultimately, it would sell over 125,000 copies with no promotion or marketing, and by the end of the decade, even find itself named by National Public Radio as one of the most important recordings of the '00s.
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As Ounsworth recalls to The Music, those early days seemed to bear no indication of the sort of critical acclaim that would await him one day.
"It had been years in the making," he remembers. "I was doing solo shows, but I was writing these songs and I decided to write more band related songs eventually. I was living in Philadelphia at the time and I got a window as to what I really wanted and started tinkering with drum machines and synthesisers.
"Pretty quickly, I had the foundation already for some of these songs."
Escaping to New York City, Ounsworth soon found himself playing as many shows as possible as a solo artist before meeting a handful of musicians who "happened to be very good at their instruments." By the time that the band had formally formed, it seemed that things were going quite well.
"I think at the first practice we probably played songs like In This Home On Ice, Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood, and Details Of The War kind of in their completion over and over again," he notes. "Those are songs that brought to the practice to sort of begin everything."
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Almost immediately, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah hit the ground running. Having established a strong relationship with this group of musicians, Ounsworth only waited several months before he entered a studio for the first time. Admittedly unseasoned in the world of recording, he remembers the experience being an exciting one.
"Some of my notes from those sessions were just bizarre and were like a kid had written them," he laughs. "You know, '5% more tambourine in this particular part,' or something that no engineer would ever do.
"There was a certain innocence to the whole thing. I wanted to take certain aspects of, let's say, the early Rolling Stones regarding tambourine sound and panning. And I remember really listening to London Calling by The Clash a lot around that time. I heard that the producer [Guy Stevens] made an atmosphere where he threw ladders at the musicians while they were trying to perform to keep them on their toes or something like that.
"I was experimenting a lot with backing vocals," he continues. "I was really interested in David Bowie's records Low and "Heroes", because I thought he had a very bizarre approach to backing vocals. And I also liked Flo & Eddie for backing vocals. T-Rex and that sort of thing. I was just tinkering with all these elements and trying to mash them into one album."
Part of the charm of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and the album itself comes from its naivete to a degree. After all, it's a record which feels accomplished yet accessible. It's an album that sounds like dedicated music fans were involved in the creation, and it feels as though your close, music-playing friends could have made it.
Perhaps that is the key to the record's success? Could the record have had the same sort of impact had Ounsworth been aware of what sort of resonance its release would inspire?
"I had a little sense from the solo shows that I was doing that people were attracted to whatever it was, either the songs, my melodies, my voice, or whatever," he remembered. "That was the earliest sign of things.
"When we were doing live shows, we played around New York for a year-and-a-half to two years before we released the album, and we were organically developing an audience that way. people were coming to our shows, we weren't really pushing it, and we didn't have any PR or anything.
"So there was a sense that this might have a bigger audience somewhere, but we didn't realise that it would be like an international thing or anything like this."
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As Ounsworth reflects on the period of time spent recording the album, it's clear that he's a humble person, and a musician not affected by the praise that has come his way over the past two decades. In fact, he comes off as someone who would very happily have not achieved the fame he did, and instead focused his efforts on crafting music regardless of the potential audience at his disposal.
"I think it's fair to say I was not intending on this as a career when I did that album and I actually had almost dismissed it as a career," he admits, explaining that how he would take issue with how the music industry continued to push sounds, artists, and trends after they've become stale.
"I thought that if I were left to my own devices and could just make albums as I saw fit, then I wouldn't have to compromise," he explains. "And there's a degree to which that has remained the case. I think people feel pressure – and rightly so – from maybe a record label, or they think they need to play X, Y, or Z TV show or something like that. I never really reached for that in that particular way, and I was never even entirely comfortable with that.
"So the compromise part of it was out of the equation. It also helped to be independent. So for me, I would've existed, I would've kept making records. I mean, I think we made that one for $3,000 or $4,000 – the cheapest way we could possibly do it at reasonably good studios.
"But we were going in whenever they had availability," he continues. "I had like a month to sit with Is This Love or something like that, and after listening to it every hour of every day for a month, I was unhappy with it. So I added this little piano thing at the beginning, added those weaving backing vocals, or I kept tinkering as time went on and because I was dissatisfied with each song and I thought they could use some embellishment."
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For those familiar with the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah story, their rise is intertwined with discussions about internet culture and the rise of the so-called 'blogosphere' in relation to how it helped to break bands. Often, when the trope of publications such as Pitchfork championing rising underground bands is discussed, it's acts like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah they're inadvertently referring to.
Indeed, the album's overwhelming response did include widespread acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork (including a 9.0 review), and the group found themselves a hot topic amongst early social media users of the era. However, even before the feedback came in, Ounsworth knew things were beginning to take off.
"I think as soon as we had the album ready to release, I would imagine the first thing that we did was put it up on our website and on MySpace – probably before an official release in 2005," he remembers.
"One of the earlier purchases was from New Zealand or Australia, I think. And I recall we were packaging these all ourselves from our apartments or whatever, wherever, and rolling down to the post office with hundreds of CDs, and going to the independent record store with a new shipment.
"I would show up and they're like, 'Are you the manager?'" he remembers. "I'm like, 'No, actually I'm the singer.' It was pretty early that this was all kind of happening. Once people heard it and the way my voice sounded, it sort of set the stage where people thought that was weird or something. But it was pretty early that it started to get attention."
By Ounsworth's own admission, he was never too tied to the internet response. Though it was hard to ignore based on the in-person response, it was a different world to what he himself had been used to.
"I think at the time we were kind of unfairly grouped into some sort of world which we did not at all create," he exp;ains. "As far as I was concerned, I remember people were saying 'blog rock,' and things like that, but I mean, I'm old enough to have remembered zines.
"These blogs were things like zines where people who generally were pretty invested in music, who kind of knew a bit about it, and didn't have any higher corporations to answer to, they were writing from the heart.
"I don't know why it had such a negative connotation, but this is the organic approach," he adds. "This is kind of what it should be, in my opinion."
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In 2025, Ounsworth and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (which comprises different musicians to those two decades ago) have been touring in support of the record's 20th birthday celebration. As a result, a lengthy look back into their discography (including playing through the debut album) has offered a rare chance to revisit a retrospective headspace; to go back to what it was like in 2005, albeit one night at a time.
"Believe it or not, the album is actually pretty close to home still," Ounsworth says. "I've said this on the tour, but I'm glad that I didn't write an album full of clunkers that just happened to get popular for no particular reason. For whatever particular reason, this album, I'm still very proud of.
"And these songs, I'm excited to get to them when they come. Gimme Some Salt is a good example of a song where I hadn't played it in quite a long time, and when it comes to that, it just feels like a big release. It's kind of amazing and it feels very close to me still.
"I'm writing the next album now and I'm realising lyrics are not the easiest thing to do," he continues. "You can approach it in a number of different ways and I was just talking today to a friend about balancing the obscure with the direct is pretty much the foundation of good poetry and good songwriting.
"It's easier said than done, of course. If you're too direct, you end up being a little cheesy, and if you're too obscure, as my fiction teacher in college used to say, murky is not deep. I think that balance was mostly struck on that album, so I'm pretty proud of it."
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These touring plans are also resulting in the long-awaited return of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to local shores.
While the band were lucky enough to debut on our shores in 2006 as part of the Splendour In The Grass line-up, a one-off Australian tour in 2007 was followed by appearances for the Laneway and Harvest Festivals in 2008 and 2011, though it's been radio silence since.
It's not like the band have been inactive, either, with three records – including 2014's Only Run 2017's The Tourist, and 2021's New Fragility – arriving in the interim. However, Ounsworth admits he's not sure why there's been such a long wait.
"I released a bunch of albums that I'm proud of, we've remained independent, but times change," he muses. "Maybe we don't have the same audience that we used to in Australia in particular. If we could keep going back there every year, I would, but it necessitates a certain demand.
"A big problem that I have with the first album, even though I really like it, is that it puts me in the position of having to go up against the first album with every album after. And I don't think that's entirely fair. In fact, I would say that I've made albums that are at least as good, but for whatever reason they didn't resonate with the right people or maybe I offended some people along the way.
"When you're staunchly independent and you're trying to get the point across without much compromise, you're bound to burn a few bridges," he notes. "And that's the nature of it, but I'm happy to go to Australia if I can."
While Australia has been only an occasional fixture on the band's itinerary, Ounsworth is glad that's changing this year, especially given the myriad memories he forged while touring in the country in those early days.
"I remember shooting a music video there in Brisbane and we were nearly killed," he states, "We were in those tunnels underneath the river as the water was rising, and then we went to some weird abandoned psychiatric hospital and I passed groups of kangaroos. That stuck out as a weird experience.
"And the thing is, you're experiencing that and you're reminding yourself you're in a foreign country too, and this all became even more surreal as a result.
"I also have good friends, Architecture In Helsinki. I remember palling around with them," he adds. "There's something about being that far away from home and then just going over to somebody's apartment, or like seeing Dan Deacon who was doing these house shows for Laneway.
"Jjust going into some stranger's apartment and experience normal, everyday life is a little bit more profound or you see the nuance and you see the details a little more clearly. In Australia, I had those types of experiences pretty readily."
Tickets to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's upcoming Australian tour are on sale now.
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Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Australian Tour 2025
Performing The Debut Album
Wednesday, November 5th – Metro Theatre, Sydney, NSW
Friday, November 7th – Northcote Theatre, Melbourne, VIC
Saturday, November 8th – The Triffid, Brisbane, QLD
