Sun. Sept. 30

    Pick any tune on Two Door Cinema Club’s debut CD, “Tourist History,” and you’ll hear fizzy electro-pop that bubbles over with youthful enthusiasm.
   The three guys in the Northern Ireland-based band are just acting naturally.
   “I think it’s to do with the fact that we’re really good friends and we’ve known each other for years,” said guitarist Sam Halliday, on the phone from Glasgow, Scotland. “We’re all pretty upbeat people. Whenever we come together, it’s fun for us to do. Instead of some friends who play sport together, for us it’s been coming together with guitars and making music.”
   Two Door Cinema Club are like Phoenix - a new European band making infectious, bouncy synth-pop. (Two Door Cinema’s first US tour was as an opener for the French act.)
   A critic for Britain’s NME reviewed Two Door Cinema’s CD favorably and opined, “Don’t tell the emos, but it seems like being happy is the new being sad.”
   Halliday laughs at the comment. “When that emo scene happened,” he said, “we weren’t really so much into it. We’re kind of an alternative. Also, we love touring and having a good time on tour, so it would be strange to make depressing music. I don’t think it would work.”
    Singer-guitarist-synthist Alex Trimble 22, bassist Kevin Baird, also 22, and Halliday, 23, became childhood chums, attending the same Bangor grammar school and high school. The band took shape four years ago, and last year they released their CD, which runs 32:37.
    “We just wanted to make a ten-track album,” Halliday said. “A strong statement of ten songs that could all be singles. And we didn’t want any filler on there. People might not get the full album nowadays, just download two or three singles, so it’s almost like it’s not worthwhile putting on 15 tracks.”
   But Two Door Cinema club is on its fifth US tour, when it hits Sunday Sept. 30 at House of Blues and as the headliner presumably has to play more than a half-hour.
    “Yeah, our show is an hour long,” Halliday said. “We had four songs dropped from the album that we play live. And we have four or five new songs as well.”
  When the Herald spoke to Halliday, he and his mates were in a home/studio they’d rented in Glasgow, working on material for a second CD.
  “The new songs are pretty different,” Halliday said. “We have a couple of pretty big songs, more rocky. I think it’s partially because we have a live drummer when we play shows [Benjamin Thompson] and we have that in mind when we’re making up parts. A couple of new songs have been written in soundcheck as well with a drum kit.”
     Halliday said the band has its sights set on bigger things. Right now, however, they like playing clubs that sell out in advance, as the Royale show has, making it a hot ticket and creating a buzz.
     They’ll up the ante next time through town. “It’s like any other sort of business,” Halliday said, “in the sense that you want to do well and take it to its potential. It doesn’t really change our approach when we’re writing together. There’s nothing being forced in any certain direction. We just write what we enjoy.  We feel like we’ve put the time in and it’s paid off.”
  As to the odd name of the band, Halliday said they appropriated it from a friend’s cinema in Northern Ireland. “It’s owned by a guy in the countryside,” Halliday said. “He loves b-movies and he did this cinema on the side of his house. It was something we loved going to and I thought it was called Two Door Cinema, when it was in fact Tudor Cinema. So, I suggested Two Door Cinema Club as a band name and in kinda stuck.”

  With Friends and Guards. Starts at 7.
  Tix: $39.50-$27.50.

15 Lansdowne St., 617-693-BLUE www.livenation.com