Silversun Pickups' Brian Aubert on Tenterhooks, Blood Transfusions & Jack Black

Brian Aubert and Nikki Monninger of Silversun Pickups have a new album called Tenterhooks to talk about, but Aubert has other priorities. He just drove a few hours from Los Angeles to attend the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, buzzing about a special event where Michael B. Jordan would discuss Sinners, Ryan Coogler's horror-blues origin story that Aubert has seen five times. "I love that movie so much. I saw it five times. I wanted to show it to other people," he said. The film currently holds 16 Academy Award nominations — the most of any movie in history. Monninger wasn't surprised. "He took the whole band crew to see it," she said, with just a hint of an eye-roll. "He tries to take us to movies when we're on tour."

That dynamic goes way back. When Aubert and Monninger were roommates in early-2000s Silver Lake, they'd host movie nights for friends — including future bandmates Christopher Guanlao and Joe Lester — and Monninger would reliably fall asleep before the credits rolled. "It was basically her ASMR," Aubert joked. "At one point, I wanted to make a compilation of all the movie endings she missed." These days he channels that obsession into regular appearances on the Breakfast All Day podcast, where he shares post-screening reactions, and he's apparently won Oscar polls at watch parties seven years running. The man knows his movies.

There might be a darker reason Sinners resonates so deeply, though. During the recording of Tenterhooks, Aubert ended up in the hospital with a severe ear infection that turned genuinely scary. He'd been taking ibuprofen on an empty stomach, which eventually tore a hole in his stomach lining, causing him to lose blood and spend five days in the hospital. "I started losing blood and was in the hospital for like five days," he said, before his sense of humor kicked back in. "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."

His ear took six months to fully heal, though — remarkably — he came out without 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. "I thought, wow, I've really worked hard over the years for that not to be the case." The hardest part wasn't the pain. It was being unable to properly hear the album while it was being made alongside producer Butch Vig, the legendary figure behind records by Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Garbage, who has worked with Silversun Pickups since their 2019 album Widow's Weeds. "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," Aubert said. "I love that experience with an album, but I just didn't get to have that this time — so I really relied on my bandmates and Butch."

His trust paid off. Tenterhooks, released February 6 on the band's own imprint New Machine, is a confident, wide-ranging collection that refuses to settle into any single lane. It opens with the emo-leaning howl of "New Wave," crunches through the bass-heavy "The Wreckage," and opens up into the psychedelic Monninger-fronted "Au Revoir Reservoir." "Interrobang" nails a '90s alt-rock feel, while the down-tuned, cinematic "Running Out of Sounds" proves that title is very much a lie. Silversun Pickups tour behind the album through May, coming off Aubert's solo acoustic winter run, during which he said, "I've been less shy with my instrument than I have in a long time."

The album title threw some people off, which apparently didn't surprise Aubert at all. "I was really surprised people haven't heard the expression 'on tenterhooks,'" he said, noting it's not the first time an album title landed with a thud of unfamiliarity. "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?" He sees the title's meaning — anxious anticipation, nail-biting uncertainty — as deeply relevant right now, and quickly makes that political. "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."

The band backed that up with action. At a recent Los Angeles Q&A event with Vig, Silversun Pickups donated all proceeds to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights L.A., an organization that has fought for immigrant and refugee rights since 1986. "They could use everyone's help," Monninger said. Aubert put it plainly: "One thing we've learned is that it's always up to us to fix everything. 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."

All of this lands in an anniversary year, too. 2026 marks two decades since the band's debut album Carnavas, home to early breakout "Lazy Eye," the song that launched Silversun Pickups into the broader indie-rock conversation. Monninger says it still feels current to them. Aubert pushes back slightly — not on the freshness, but on the nostalgia. "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, describing fans who approach them after shows with deep personal memories attached to that debut record.

The band's origin story is anything but conventional. Aubert and Monninger met in college in the '90s on a flight from L.A. to London for an exchange program at Cambridge University. "Everyone likes to talk about how I saw her on the plane stealing alcohol," Aubert laughed. "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. So when I saw her stealing the alcohol, I thought, I judged her wrong." In London, Monninger picked the club shows they attended, including a 200-person Green Day gig and a Radiohead set Aubert almost skipped. "I initially said no to that. I was like, the 'Creep' band? I didn't know it at the time but it changed my life."

Back home in Los Angeles, playing venues like Spaceland and the Silverlake Lounge, the band encountered early sexism that still sticks with Monninger. "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," she said. "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."

One of the warmer stories in the Silversun Pickups universe involves Jack Black, who appears in the band's new video for "The Wreckage" — a delightfully weird clip in which an alien hijacks a woman's body in a dive bar bathroom. Black is married to cellist Tanya Hayden, a longtime friend who used to perform onstage with the band. The band says they played a small but real role in making that relationship happen. "A friend of mine wanted us to be a part of this Doctors Without Borders benefit in Los Angeles with Tenacious D," Aubert explained. "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." Not a bad cameo origin story.

It's the kind of thing that, Aubert says, could only happen in L.A. "Because the thing about L.A. is it's a thousand small towns," he said, reaching for a film reference almost instinctively. "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. 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."