Every D.A.R.E. student knows the myth of the gateway drug: That one joint you smoke inevitably leads to shooting heroin between your toes next to a Dumpster. The scenario is bullshit of course, but it's a handy way to look at !!!. The pan-American dance-rock collective are like that first disco joint that leads punk purists down the dark path of dance music.
"I remember the first time I listened to a Chic record," says Nic Offer, !!!'s loose-limbed lead singer, recounting his own dance-music cherry busting during a sound check in Stockholm, Sweden. "We listened to C'est Chic, and I was on acid when we put the record on. We put the second side on first just because—"
The connection dies, and when we get back on the line, Offer's forgotten the reasoning.
"It was really Johnny Marr's fault that we got into it," he cracks. "So that was one for disco, and we got really into that. The next one is—and I suggest this for anyone who doesn't like any kind of electronic- or house-type music—the first Daft Punk album. It was an absolute revelation, and I think it was for everyone all across the dance-punk scene. That's a great gateway album."
!!! emerged out of Sacramento punk bands and house parties in 1995, bonding over a newly discovered and shared love of mind-expanding dance music. After relocating to New York in 2003, they released "Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard (A True Story)," which emerged as one of the central manifestos of the brief dance-punk moment (along with LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" and the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers").
"It was kind of a shock," says Offer. "To go for years being unable to describe your music to anyone, and then suddenly being able to tell people flat out, 'Oh, we're disco-punk—we're exactly this.' We didn't like being lumped in with all that, so we felt like we needed to press it further, to go further out. In a way it kind of forced us to move on out, so it was good."
Along with the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem, !!! are one of the few bands that survived and evolved past the dance-punk trend, thanks to their long-standing determination to push boundaries and break rules.
"I think it's turned into a small handful because it's written its own rulebook too quickly," says Offer. "I think we were just lucky to be there at the beginning. When we did it, we were making it up as we went along. And it very quickly turned into this very rigid thing of referencing only a certain type of group and only a certain thing is cool. But when we did it at the beginning, none of it was cool. I think people need to bring more uncool things into it and take more chances."
!!! have explored their share of uncharted territory. After the success of "Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard," the band released Louden Up Now, a full-length that contained a couple disco anthems but also ventured into reverb-soaked psych jams and wobbly electronics. They followed that up with adventurous covers of the Magnetic Fields' folk trip "Take Ecstasy with Me" and Nate Dogg's g-funked "Get Up." In between records, Offer and other !!! members also recorded as Out Hud, a more experimental, dub-focused band that recently folded.
"I've always described the two bands as like, 'Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot,'" says Offer. "Each band would make a better record because we learned something from the last record with the other band. In a way, even though it is different people, it's very much a natural progression through all five records."
!!!'s latest, Myth Takes, finds the band walking familiar disco struts on tracks like "Must Be the Moon" and "Heart of Hearts" as well as exercising some new muscles on the stargazing existential ballad "Infinifold" and the blues freak-outs of "Yadnus" and "Sweet Life." The recording process found the band literally exploring and inhabiting new spaces.
"We rented a house in Nashville for a few weeks," says Offer. "We lived there and just kind of jammed a bunch, mic'd everything up, recorded to a computer, and then made loops out of that. We also lived in a studio in Sacramento for about a month and worked there every day and had free rein on that. And then we did a bunch of recording and mixing in New York."
Offer's optimistic about the possibilities still presented by the collision of dance and rock traditions in the wake of the disco-punk era.
"The Klaxons album is definitely a post-disco-punk record," he says. "But it's something wide-open. It doesn't need to reference these obscure records, and it kind of just uses the different rhythms that rock can make to make something totally fresh. I don't think it has to be over. I think there's still a lot of things to be done." 
