Kevin Bronson on August 24th, 2015

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We have come to bury Eastern Conference Champions, but also to praise them.

The Los Angeles trio this morning quietly released their third full-length album, “Love in Wartime.” It’s their finest, and available in all the usual digital places. Then the band announced via social media that they are breaking up, after 11 years.

“I’m pretty heartbroken about it,” singer and songwriter Joshua Ostrander tells a longtime follower when he arrives at the Verdugo Bar one night last week. It’s just past 8 p.m., and he warns that he can’t stay out too late. He has to get up at 5 in the morning for his day job — working for a landscaping contractor. He tells a quick anecdote about being on a job recently on a college campus when a co-worker spotted a student wearing an ECC T-shirt and naively suggested Ostrander go say hi. That is heartbreaking too.

Not that the Philadelphia native has anything against manual labor. He is tanned and fit and, he says, “in a good place.” He is rightfully proud of “Love in Wartime,” which has been finished since last October, and justifiably wounded over severing band ties with drummer Greg Lyons, ECC’s co-founder, and guitarist Melissa Dougherty — who was wooed to join ECC in this very bar in 2009.

“We saw her play at the Troubadour, and I remember thinking, ‘We have to get this girl in the band,’” Ostrander says. “So Greg and I lured her here and we got shit-faced. That was a fun time. It was just this great energy that she brought to the band.”

“Love in Wartime,” recorded in Manny Nieto’s studio in L.A., follows 2011’s “Speak-Ahh,” released when ECC had gained some steam from having its song “A Million Miles an Hour” appear in the “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” soundtrack. ECC’s first album “Ameritown” came out in 2007 on Suretone/Interscope before the band went indie and released the excellent “Santa Fe” EP in 2009.

The new record rattles with brash guitars, brawny rhythms and tough-’n’-tender lyrics. At its heart, it’s a classic rock album (Springsteen, Petty, the Who, Neil Young) art-damaged the way the Pixies might have done classic rock: Abrade first, ask questions later. “He’s a heat seeker sucking your blood / I’m a fire breathing mother fucker coming for ya,” Ostrander spits in the opening, title track. As testosterone-charged he sounds then, and on the screeching “Black Francis,” he plays the pure romantic on “The Fire” (“There’s miles and miles of lights / bouncing off of you, bouncing off of us”). Lyons drives “In Search of Fuller Moons” and “The Whip” into a beautiful frenzy. And “The Kingfishers” is a chilling ballad delivered in a cracking voice.

In sum, there’s plenty on “Love in Wartime” to suggest ECC was in its prime. So why, in the months and months ECC shopped the record, did no label want to give them a chance? Ultimately, Ostrander explains, this is why he is pulling the plug; after 11 years, he simply didn’t see the DIY path as being viable.

The talk at the Verdugo Bar ends up being fairly short. It’s obvious he is still processing, still gathering his thoughts, still occasionally referring to Eastern Conference Champions in the present tense. He’s also painfully aware that if calling it quits were to have been put to a band/management vote, he might have lost.

How hard was it to pull the plug?

It was tough. I talked to Greg first, obviously. It gets to the point where your creativity can’t … when you can’t … when … you’re writing new stuff and the songs you wrote two years ago aren’t even out there yet. … We couldn’t find a label to put out the record, and we couldn’t afford to self-release it properly, like we did with “Speak-Ahh.” We released that, we toured behind it, we went through Europe. We won’t get to do that. So it that sense, it’s sad, because it was such a great band and it was a great working band. And all we wanted to do is work. I feel bad even bitching about it, hearing myself talk about it. Dude, we had the best time.”

Do you feel responsible?

In the sense that it was my call, yes. The fact that it was so tough for me made me respect how good the band is, or was. If you break up a band and everybody’s like, “OK, cool, see ya,” I think you might have missed the mark.

But are you thinking to yourself, “Damn, could I have done something else?”

As the songwriter, yes. Hey, the songs just weren’t good enough. That’s what it comes down to. If the songs were good enough, it would have translated. It sucks. I don’t know if a lot of songwriters deal with it, but that sucked for me. I mean, maybe the songs were good, but … You know when you hear a tune and you tell your friend about it? I don’t know if we ever had that moment. It bums me out because we fucking tried.

How hard did Greg and Melissa and Josh (their last manager) try and talk you out of it?

It was such a family affair. But I kept telling everyone that when this ends, it’s important that this ends well. Greg and I have put almost 12 years into this. And it just got to the point where I wasn’t happy and the band wasn’t happy. I thought it was in everyone’s best interests to end it.

It’s obviously weighing on you and it might for a while …

Sure, it’s probably more of a burden for the singer and songwriter. It goes back to, hell, if the songs were better, I’d be calling you from Amsterdam right now. For whatever reason it didn’t click. But for instance if I ever say anything to my wife that’s like, “Oh we never quite got the success we wanted,” she always looks at me like I’m crazy. She tells me, “You’ve traveled the world, you’ve put out great music, you’ve rocked every person who’s come out to any show.” And she’s right, man. It was the best time. It was awesome. I loved it. But when it comes to a point where you can’t find a way to get the music out there properly and you’re just slaving away on things nobody’s gonna hear, it’s time to move on to something else.

There’s a small but loud minority who believe the songs were plenty good.

I do think some of the songs on this new record are the best we’ve ever done. I think “The Kingfishers” is the best song I’ve ever written. But now … I haven’t listened to the record in a long time. I think I might listen to it on Monday. Even doing the artwork for it was tough, because we all poured so much into it. It’s a heavy, heavy thing.

Those people would also find your day job, well … just wrong.

I’m working two jobs, the day job and I started my own business. I get frustrated too, but I write lyrics when I’m working. I’m up at 5. I get ideas down before people even get up. I don’t mind working hard — I grew up doing that with my pops. I was never like a class warrior or anything like that. I don’t care about that; I wanna work my ass off and give you the best show of your life. There’s something to be said for working your ass off and then going to band practice and singing your heart out. There’s something great about that. I see certain bands today that have it too easy — they got nothing to fucking sing about. I watched the Foo Fighters thing on HBO and it was awesome, but, you know, they lost the plot. There’s a disconnect there. It’s tough be successful and connect with the people who still buy your music. I respect people who can, because that’s a hard gig.

Should we talk about the album too? Seems like I could go on forever about it … “In Search of Fuller Moons” seems to have one of those larger-than-life metaphors.

My old dog was named Moon. My wife and I went and stayed in Palm Springs, and there was an article I saw there headlined “In Search of Fuller Moons” and it stuck with me. And I spun it into this storyline about traveling through time with my old dog.

“Top Of It?”

Wrote that song about an old manager we had — we’ve had many managers, so nobody will be able to tell who it was. That line “We got our best man working on it” … Yeah, right. You’re on tour and you get stuck in a certain city, or you need something, and you depend on people to do their job.

And “The Kingfishers?”

It’s about a friend I went to high school with, my first drummer, a guy named Keith. He passed away, overdosed on heroin. I had lost touch with him — when we played Philly, he would always come out to shows. Somebody Facebooked me and let me know what happened and I sat down and wrote that song in a half an hour. It was about the time when you’re 15 or 16, and you start smoking cigarettes and sleeping with girls and running around. We used to go to the reservoir, and the memories and images of the birds just fit with Keith.

“Palisades” is pretty starry-eyed too.

I wrote a lot of the lyrics on this album about getting married or being married. In almost every song the word “forever” is in the lyrics, and I did that as a little nod to my wife. I met her at South by Southwest. She had come to see us when we opened for Black Rebel Motorcylce Club in Philly, but I was on a blind date that night. Then I saw her a month later at Wolfmother and she came up and said, “Do you remember me?” I was hanging out with the drummer from Denali, and I told him, “When she comes back up, can you ask her name?” That was it.

Look at that, though. I met my wife because of the band. So many pivotal things have come from this.

It’s just heavy man.

You said last week, “I’m in a good place”?

I am in a good place, I feel really good. There was some of, “Well, now I don’t have to go to rehearsal and play the same song I’ve been playing for a year.” You get into the rhythm of seeing people and it’s nice. That camaraderie. And that takes some getting used to when it’s not there. So that’s where I am.