On an afternoon when Brian Aubert and Nikki Monninger are supposed to be talking with me about Silversun Pickups’ new album Tenterhooks, Aubert can’t help but steer the conversation towards his other love: movies.
He just drove a couple hours from his home in Los Angeles to attend the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and is giddy with excitement about attending a special event where actor Michael B. Jordan will discuss the movie Sinners.
“I love that movie so much. I saw it five times. I wanted to show it to other people,” Aubert admitted of the breakaway horror/blues origin story film, created by Ryan Coogler. To his point, the movie currently has 16 Academy Award nominations, the most of any motion picture in history.
“He took the whole band crew to see it,” Monninger piped in with a twinge of derision. “He tries to take us to movies when we’re on tour.”
This dynamic has existed since the two were roommates in the early 2000s in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood, at a time the Silversun Pickups were just getting their footing. Aubert and Monninger would host movie nights for friends, including eventual bandmates Christopher Guanlao and Joe Lester. But Monninger admittedly would always fall asleep. “It was basically her ASMR,” Aubert joked, adding, “At one point, I wanted to make a compilation of all the movie endings she missed.”
Aubert’s Ebert-like passion still comes out nowadays as he logs regular appearances on the “Breakfast All Day” podcast where he shares “out of the theater reactions” to various releases. He’s also proud to admit he’s won Oscar movie polls at watch parties each of the last seven years. Naturally, he predicts Sinners will win big this year.
More than the film’s obvious merit, though, Aubert’s proclivity towards the flick may have to do with the fact that he just may be a vampire, too.
During the making of Tenterhooks, the frontman and guitarist ended up in the hospital due a severe ear infection that eventually required blood transfusions. “It started to hurt so bad, I was taking ibuprofen, but I wasn’t eating, and it cut a hole in my stomach. I started losing blood and was in the hospital for like five days,” Aubert shared of the terrifying medical event, before cutting the recollection with his sense of humor. “It was interesting because I could taste someone else’s blood behind my mouth. And it made me wonder if, like, vampires think this person tastes like shit. This person tastes great.”
It took six months for Aubert’s ear to fully heal and thankfully he didn’t have any permanent hearing damage. “I had to take a hearing test, and I don’t know why, but my hearing is not that bad,” he said with a shrug. “I thought, wow, I’ve really worked hard over the years for that not to be the case.”
The worst part of it all was that he wasn’t able to really listen to the band’s new album as it was actively in production with the legendary Butch Vig (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage) behind the boards. Silversun Pickups has continually worked with Vig since 2019’s Widow’s Weeds, calling him “family” at this point.
“The thing I love the most about making records is all the stuff before it’s finished, when things aren’t cemented in and it’s still got wanderlust because you’re still working on it and you still have an imagination with it. I love that experience with an album, but I just didn’t get to have that this time,” Aubert shared, “so I really relied on my bandmates and Butch.”
They delivered. What resulted on Tenterhooks (released February 6 on the band’s own label, New Machine) is an evolved collection of songs that continue Silversun Pickups’ commitment to never play by a rule book or stick to formulaic slop. The album opens with the emo-like wails of “New Wave” and follows with the bass-heavy rock churn of “The Wreckage” before dipping its psychedelic toes into the Monninger-led “Au Revoir Reservoir.” Other standouts include the ’90s alt-rock stamp of “Interrobang” and the down-tuned cinematic splendor of “Running Out of Sounds,” which is a bold-faced lie as far as the band is concerned. Silversun Pickups will tour on the album through May, coming off Aubert’s winter acoustic solo trek where, he said, “I’ve been less shy with my instrument than I have in a long time.”
The new album name is an interesting one, even if it’s not in everyone’s vocabulary. “I was really surprised people haven’t heard the expression ‘on tenterhooks,’” Aubert admitted, noting this is not the first time this has happened. “The other one that always threw me for a loop is that we have a record called Neck of the Woods. And I was like, that is as fundamental as it gets but there were still so many people who were like, so what is that about? I had to wonder, are these too old-timey?” As he speaks, he does so with the conviction of a dad to a 10-year-old, his son Nico, who recently shamed him with the whole “6-7” meme.
But, I remind Aubert, the Tenterhooks title seemingly falls in a long line of rock records and songs that have introduced other young people to new words, i.e. Helmet’s “Milquetoast,” Local H’s love of “copacetic” on “Bound for the Floor” and Seven Mary Three’s “Cumbersome.” After using the excuse to break out into a passionate sing-along of the latter, Aubert regained his composure and shed more light on the purposeful intention behind the album name.
“It’s like anxiety or nail biting, like you’re apprehensively awaiting something … and who doesn’t feel that right now,” he admitted before quickly taking a more vocal political stance. “There’s always plenty of people who say, stay in your lane. And I’m like, what are you talking about? You mean we can’t talk about the things that are literally affecting our lives? They’re not staying out of our lanes. They’re mucking with our worlds. This is Gestapo shit. This is the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen, like only in movies,” he added, tying it back into his cinematic worldview. “And so to cowardly say you can’t speak about that is wild.”
At a recent Q&A event in L.A. with Vig, the band put those thoughts into action, giving all proceeds to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights L.A. that’s been around since 1986 with a mission to advance the rights of immigrants and refugees.
“They could use everyone’s help,” Monninger shared of partnering with the nonprofit organization.
“One thing we’ve learned is that it’s always up to us to fix everything,” Aubert added, clarifying, “I mean society. Humans. People. The towns. It’s literally up to us. And we’re very lucky people to be able to have a world that we get to do this for a living and express ourselves. And part of it is giving back to our world as much as we can.”
Tenterhooks and its wider messaging also comes at an interesting personal time for the band as 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of their debut album, Carnavas, which produced the early hit “Lazy Eye” and sent Silversun Pickups into its quick rise. “It’s weird because it still feels fresh to us,” said Monninger before Aubert quickly jumped in with a rebuttal. “But we don’t have the same nostalgia for it,” he said, referencing fans who will often come up to the band after gigs and share how they’ve listened to “Lazy Eye” since high school.
“This sounds so stupid to say, but because we don’t take ourselves seriously, I’ve had to learn to respect our band in front of those people and learn to say thank you,” he admitted. If it sounds gruff, his stance is better understood with some context of the random and unassuming way the band was started in the first place.
“Everyone likes to talk about how I saw her on the plane stealing alcohol,” Aubert joked, referencing when he and Monninger, in college in the ’90s, were both on a plane from L.A. to London to embark on an exchange program with Cambridge University and she pilfered goods from the bar cart. “But actually, I remember Nikki from the very first meeting about the trip. Her mom was so intense and I was like, wow, that woman is not letting that girl speak,” he joked. “So when I saw her stealing the alcohol, I thought, I judged her wrong.”
It was that natural confidence he saw in Monninger that has been a backbone of the band ever since, even as sexism reared its head in the early days. “I wouldn’t be able to go backstage because no girlfriends were allowed. Or they would think I was the publicist and would let my husband through and not me. I’m like, what?” the bassist and vocalist recalled. “We came up from playing at Spaceland and the Silverlake Lounge on the East side of L.A. where there was a girl in every band, so that was so odd to us.”
Monninger, too, played a key role in those early London days, choosing the small club shows she took Aubert to, shows which would eventually shape the band’s musical path.. “We saw Green Day in like a 200-person club. Radiohead, too. I initially said no to that,” Aubert shamefully admitted. “I was like the ‘Creep’ band? I didn’t know it at the time but it changed my life.”
Silversun Pickups recently had another blast from the past when making the wackadoo video for their new single “The Wreckage,” in which an alien takes over an unsuspecting woman’s body in a bathroom stall at a dive bar. It features a cameo from one of the band’s other favorite movie stars, Jack Black. The actor is married to the band’s longtime friend, cellist Tanya Hayden, who used to play onstage with Silversun Pickups many eons ago. The band takes partial credit for bringing her and Black together.
“Tanya was an unofficial fifth member that would come on stage sometimes. This before we were signed, years before we made a record,” Aubert explained. “A friend of mine wanted us to be a part of this Doctors Without Borders benefit in Los Angeles with Tenacious D. Jack saw Tanya and remembered her from the high school that they used to go together, and he always liked her. And so they rekindled and got married and had kids from that very stage.”
In Hollywood speak, they’d call that a happy ending. It’s one of the beauties of living and working in Tinsel Town, according to the band. “Because the thing about L.A. is it’s a thousand small towns,” explained Aubert, comparing the atmosphere to, of course, a movie. “If you’ve seen the movie Licorice Pizza, as an Angeleno, that was very right on the money. It’s where things feel dreamlike and a little out of reach,” he added. “That’s just how it functions, to the chagrin of some people, but also to the delight of adventurers that still have a lot to explore.”
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