Kevin Bronson on July 1st, 2011

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Tommy Goodkin, the Post War Quartet frontman, is telling an interviewer about the band’s song “The Blue Light.” “It was inspired by the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita,” he says matter-of-factly. “I was into a lot of theologies at the time. I wasn’t much of a singer when we started working on it, but we played it and played it after a year it started to sound like a real song.”

Goodkin is 15. His bandmates Elliot Glickman, Jacob Hanover and Jake Spivack are similarly young – all, he says, “Westside kids whose parents have known each other forever” and who started hashing out their own material when they were 13.

||| Download: “Contemporary Nightmare”

Post War Quartet first got together to play Hanover’s bar mitzvah (“We played some of the worst covers ever,” Goodkin says) and carried on because, “Part of being in a rock ’n’ roll band is saying screw you to the baseball practices and all that, and, of course, it’s a way to vent our teenage white people problems.” Their early songs are rooted in classic garage and blues rock, and “Contemporary Nightmare” has already found its way onto Sirius XMU.

It is with equanimity beyond his years that Goodkin talks about the band’s influences – “eclectic, from jazz and blues to classic rock and indie” – as well as the rigors of making songs with your friends. “Even if you’re accomplished musicians,” he says, “communication is the hardest part about being in a band.”

Then there’s the generational disconnect. “Most people our age don’t really understand what we’re doing,” Goodkin says, “and people older than us don’t want to see a bunch of 15-year-olds do what we do.”

Eventually, though, it will all be about the song. Whether you’re 15 or 65, “Contemporary Nightmare” marks Post War Quartet as a band to watch.