Children.

WHEN DRUNKEN HEAD BANGING, shredding twin guitar leads, and getting totally ripped on Mercyful Fate's Don't Break the Oath becomes less of a novelty and more of a nightly event, it's time to abandon all hope and go nuclear. Enter New York City jumpsuit enthusiasts Children and the spacey, apocalyptic power thrash they deliver on their full-length debut, Hard Times Hangin" at the End of the World. Formed in 2006 by guitarists Skyler Spohn and Jonny Ollsin, a pair of balls-out rift demons with a skate/punk pedigree (Ollsin was a member of defunct Vancouver skate-thrash brigade STREETS), Children wisely enlisted Early Man drummer Adam Bennati and cranked out psychedelic ax workouts with titles like "Power Spirit," "Nuclear Bummer," and "Advanced Mind Control." But we'll let them break it down.

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If Children had a mission statement, what would it be?

Jonny Ollsin: Oh, man ... how about "Try not to luck it up"?

Skyler Spohn: Yeah, "Don't blow it." That's a good one.

You mean in a live setting?

Ollsin: I mean in a life setting. Maybe it's a good statement for trying to make rad music, too. Don't blow it, you know? But also for the fact that we can, like, barely function as a band as far as making t-shirts and organizing shit.

Spohn: That's not to say that we're so sure of ourselves and our music that we're definitely not blowing it. But we're trying not to, at least. It seems like you have a "perfect is the enemy of good" approach to recording. Does that extend to playing shows?

Ollsin: Yeah, maybe 'cause we never fuckin' practice. I like it best when we're locked in, but we've had issues with members not living in the same city as us so we don't get a chance to rehearse that often. My favorite shows are when we're killing it, but we've played some sloppy shows that have been our favorites.

Spohn: They're all kind of sloppy lately.

Ollsin: That's true. Plus, we don't really have a drummer anymore. Adam moved to Los Angeles, and then we got this dude Froggy who was killing it, but now he's moving, too.

Where did you get the name Children?

Ollsin: It was sort of a combination of things. We were really hot on Flower Travellin' Band at the time and a lot of the themes they were doing with the apocalypse. They had a song called "Hiroshima," and the chorus is, "Children of the mushroom, aren't we all?" So we kind of took it from that. Also, my old band STREETS had a song called "Children," which was one of the last songs we wrote before we broke up, and I really liked that song.

Spohn: It was also pretty cold out when we first moved to New York, and instead of saying, "It's pretty chilly out," we'd say, "It's pretty children out." We thought that sounded kind of cool.

Ollsin: It was part of our slang. Also, I like to think about how much fucked-up shit's going on in the world, and that it really is about the children. There's a cool Poison Idea song about it that goes, "The world will be gone, so we won't care, but all the children will still be there." In that sense, the band name is a symbol of being conscious of the shit you do. I think it's about romanticizing our youth, too--before we had to go to work and do a bunch of other shit.

Spohn: And if you listen to the lyrics, our album is kind of about how it's hard to get by fight now. We're both new to New York, and we're also both kind of new to tons of responsibilities, so it's fitting, because we're losing our childhood and becoming adults.

Bummer High is making a deck with your album art on it. How did that happen?

Ollsin: Ethan Fowler is a bro, he's super cool, and he just asked if we wanted to do it. When I was a kid, he was one of my favorite skateboarders because his style was so unique, so it's so fuckin' cool that he's doing a skateboard for us. It's funny, though, my wife Kim did the artwork and she was never a skater, so when it comes to the Bummer High thing she doesn't even really know or care. But it means a lot to us.

What's your skating history?

Spohn: Jonny has more of a skate history than I do. I was pretty much a teenage skater who never really ... I mean, I could do some stuff, but I didn't take it as far as Jonny did.

Ollsin: When I was a kid, skating was my number one thing, and we played punk rock when we weren't skating. I grew up in Vancouver Island in BC, and one of my best friends when I was a kid was Keegan Sauder. We skated a shit-ton together. But then music became more important. The turning point came when I was trying to do this wallride ramp transfer and I totally sprained my wrist and couldn't play guitar for a long time. That really upset me, so that's when I made the shift. That was probably when I was 22 or 23.

It's always an injury that seals the deal.