Fun. Claim They’re ‘Not an Indie Band’

Fun. have produced one of the biggest hits of 2012 in ‘We Are Young,’ and according to guitarist Jack Antonoff, this is only the beginning.

Antonoff was talking to Rolling Stone about his band’s upcoming appearance at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival next month in Manchester, Tenn. The guitarist states that fun. never wanted to be some obscure band that the masses wouldn’t be aware of. “We’re not an indie band,” he says. “That’s never who we’ve been. ‘Some Nights,’ for us, is a massive coming out of this band that wants to be this larger-than-life rock band.”

Despite the success of ‘We Are Young,’ Antonoff stresses that fun. won’t be known just for that song. They have been gaining a following ever since singer Nate Ruess formed the band in 2008 after his old gang, the Format, broke up.

“We are so grateful and so much in love with the fact that we had the definition before the song became what it did, because the truth is no matter how big the song gets, or how many copies it sells, or how much it’s on the radio, it can’t define us,” Antonoff explains. “Real human beings — real kids who have been coming to the shows — have already done that … [Our] fans are the ones who said a fun. show is about screaming every word back at us.”

He continues: “I think that all those new people will see that, and I think that our old fans take a lot of pride in explaining to all these new people what a Fun. show is. And Bonnaroo, to me, is going to be a wonderful culmination of those two things.”

Listen to fun. and Paramore’s Hayley Williams cover Gotye (another unexpected hitmaker) and his song, ‘Somebody That I Used to Know,’ here.