In 2003, The Electric Six went from being a popular Detroit rock band to British chart toppers when their songs Danger! High Voltage, Gay Bar, and Dance Commander hit the airwaves. Since then, their flair for humorous lyrics, catchy tunes, outlandish videos, and their dedicated work ethic has earned them a cult following.

In fact, it seems like there's never a moment when The Six aren't touring or releasing a new album, so it comes as no surprise that they're currently touring the United States in support of their fourth album, I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master, which comes out October 8.

Nothing at all, actually. We were intending to call the record Bloodbath, and that just kind of didn't sit as well with me, and I was at the museum, saw that painting, saw the title, and thought, "That's got to be the name of the record." I got on the horn with my manager and said, "Is there any problem with ripping off the name of a drawing and making it an album?" and he said, "No." And there you have it.

What is it personally that is restricting you from becoming the master?

Once you realize that you have no world left to conquer, you usually end up weeping. Or so they say.

Do you feel that you've conquered the world?

No, not at all. And it's a great feeling to know that you've always got challenges in front of you, to know that you'll never quite get to what you're going. To reference one of the lines in the song, "It's a marathon, not a sprint." If you leave yourself with things to do, you'll grow happily into your eighties and nineties with a full head of steam. No Alzheimer's for this guy.

What is it that inspired the octopus on the cover?

We wanted a kind of an ambiguous cover that conveyed a certain amount of tension.

Would you say that The Electric Six is in any way like an octopus?

Sure. There's six of us, our manager, and our merch girl.

You've called your last album, Switzerland, The Electric Six at their most subtle. What is this album?

This is just us making our fourth record. I think we've kind of realized-- not to say that we will-- that we could probably make nine or ten records, and then you just kind of want to have each album answer each other and make sure you don't make the record you just made. So I think we looked at Switzerland, and it was a bit more subdued. We wanted to be a bit more over the top and try some things.

It seems like the opening track, It's Showtime, is about fans who demand too much of you.

To some degree, yeah. When we tour, we tour pretty excessively, and that's why that song is a good lead, because you do six shows a week, and you can only take so much of some meathead coming up and putting you in a bear hold and jumping up and down and saying, "Dance commander!" over and over again. And that song is trying to express that a bit.

How much do your fans tend to analyze your lyrics?

I don't know. I sometimes put some care and effort into the lyrics, and I think for the most part people tend to get it, but I also try to leave a lot of room for individual interpretation and use.

Technically, I'm the only one who does, because I live in New York, and I ride the F train a lot. That's what that song was based on. My friend came to visit and he took the A train and switched to the F, and he said, "I noticed when I left the A train and got on the F, it got a lot whiter."

So people that had any concerns about the Electric Six suddenly developing some sort of cocaine habit were...

(Laughs) Well, we'll never have a habit. Let's put it that way.

I was very curious about the meaning of one track in particular When I Get To The Green Building

It's actually about Domino's Farms in Ann Arbor. It's this big kind of compound where Domino's has their world headquarters, and at night it lights up really green. But there's other notable green buildings, like Mark Mothersbaugh's music company on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood; it's a green flying saucer. In Downtown Dallas, there's a skyscraper that lights up green at night. But it's also, I think, a metaphor for death, if you analyze the song. That's not to say that Domino's Pizza equals death, it's just that I think that's where the song is going.

And what is your own personal opinion of death?

I don't really think it's necessarily a bad thing. I'm not entirely convinced that there is an afterlife, though I'm willing to entertain it. I don't think that there is a higher being judging everybody. Though there could be a higher being, I just don't think that your actions on earth somehow get you into one place or another. And for the most part, I don't generally fear it anymore.

At this point in your career, have you put any thought into what you would like your legacy to be?

I have a hard time with words like 'legacy' and 'estate'. Like I'm starting to accumulate property and things, and I'm starting to think about how I have to will things to my family and to my fiancée. So, things that you leave behind, like the estate or the legacy. I've never thought about myself in those terms.

What I would like people to say is that here was a man who just intended to play the Old Miami a couple times, and then he ended up in Russia and Estonia. To me, I never really intended for this thing to get this big. Even though it's not that big, it's a lot bigger than I thought it ever would be. So I think people should say, "Kudos to him. Kudos to the people around him. Let's give them a pat on the back."

Story by Ben Kharakh
Starpulse.com contributing writer