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When The Myriad debuted in 2005 with You Can't Trust a Ladder, the artful alternative rockers earned immediate buzz amongst the Christian crowd and indie rockers alike. The Seattle-based band was quickly named a "Staff Favorite" on iTunes (sandwiched between The White Stripes and Foo Fighters) and heavily featured on MTV's "Real World Denver." Doors have only continued to open for them in the two years since. During a high profile club tour with David Crowder Band, The Myriad was selected by MTV from among 4,000 entrants for the Dew Circuit Breakout competition—and they eventually won the whole thing. Talk about perfect timing for the band to release their sophomore effort With Arrows, With Poise. Frontman Jeremy Edwardson and guitarist Steven Tracy took time to chat with Christian Music Today about the band's newfound opportunities, and why faith is still a vital component to The Myriad.

The Myriad's guitarist Steven Tracy says, "e;You can't separate our faith from our art. We'll never stop doing that. It will always be part of what we do."e;

How did you attract the attention of Koch after your first CD spent its time in the underground Christian market through Floodgate?

Steven Tracy About a year ago, we had to go through a label change, and Floodgate was very helpful in finding a new home. We ended up recording With Arrows, With Poise on our own and started getting it out to people; [Koch's interest] started from there. They've been pretty amazing and supportive of what we wanted to do.

Jeremy Edwardson We seriously threw out our best case scenario of what we wanted to do, and Koch came in willing to help us finish our album in style. They told us the sky's the limit, and we said, "Really?" It's been so awesome and it ended up being a really ambitious sophomore record for us, even though it started [on such a smaller scale].

The new CD has been compared to everyone from Radiohead to Kent to Björk. How do you account for such astute artistic influences?

Edwardson Kent is an interesting reference because when I met Steven about six years ago at a recording studio in Seattle, we both had Kent's Isola CD in our car stereos. We started laughing because they're such an overlooked and obscure indie Swedish band. We keyed into their idea of writing pop choruses that are undeniably pop, but put together in an interesting, artful way that doesn't necessarily follow a pop formula. It's about writing music that's really catchy, rich, and poignant, and we don't want to be so artsy that we're over people's heads. We have no desire to do that and that's what we've always loved about Kent.

Tracy We've certainly been influenced by Radiohead, Portishead, and Björk, and that's why we were really interested in going overseas to work with the Swedish producer who mixed The Cardigans' Long Gone Before Daylight album and had connections with Kent. There's something about that Swedish/European aesthetic that really lends itself to our album.

Was there a pre-conceived game plan when you were writing the new record to break beyond the church and dive deeper into the mainstream scene?

Tracy To be honest, we don't really think about it that much. There was no big master plan, though when we started writing and recording this record, we knew we were at a crossroads. At the time, we didn't have anyone telling us what to do or how to sound, so we figured if we did something really honest and pure from a faith side, that's all God would ask. There really wasn't a lot of strategy to it other than to make something we love and feel we were created to make.

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