Young The Giant is a band with aspirations – that much becomes clear after only a short listen into their recently released, much-hyped-about debut album. One talk with drummer François Comtois on where their name came from, and that point is hammered home even further. When describing where their name comes from, he references Radiohead directly. “If I had heard out of context the name Radiohead, I would have no idea what they were playing or what they were doing. Then that name takes on a whole different meaning when you listen to their records, and that was kind of what the hope was with us, that the music would speak for itself,” Comtois said. Picked as one of Alternative Addiction’s top band to watch in 2011, Young The Giant have already been making waves in the first few weeks of the new year. With a huge appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, then subsequently being chosen as the iTunes Free Single of the Week, they’ve landed heaps of praise for their original sound, as well as their catchy single “My Body”, which is finally making waves at radio. The band’s chemistry is probably the first thing that would strike an audience member at their live show, something Comtois touched on when Alternative Addiction spoke with him recently. “We have been playing together in some incarnation for the past five years, but didn’t really start to take it seriously until two or three years ago. Then, even more seriously when we got signed about a year and a half ago,” explained Comtois. “Since we got signed, it’s been pretty much all work trying to get this record out. Early on, we were all in high school and trying to figure out where were going to go to college, so the band took a backseat for a little bit, but now it’s full-time for all of us.” Their self-titled debut album, which was tracked completely live in the studio, has been gaining momentum ever since its release in late October. “What we wanted originally was to capture the sound from our live shows,” Comtois says. “That was what we wanted going into it. There’s just something about playing live where you feed off of one another; something you don’t get when you’re tracking an album one instrument at a time, which makes it a little more sterile. This is our first major release, but we all spent time recording together in friend’s garages, and this is always the way we did it, so we had an idea of how it was supposed to go. Hopefully that makes it a tighter record, or a tighter sound.” Their album is out now digitally, and comes out on physical copy January 25th in the US. The band will then be heading to the UK and Germany for the month of February, then back to the states for more touring, and their single “My Body” is at radio right now.