Published 2009-04-02T00:00:00Z”/>

David Wangberg

London-based noisemakers PRE will be rocking TiON tonight at 8 to promote their second album “Hope Freaks,” which will be released this summer.

Tickets are $5 and fans of the band will get the chance to hear the new album live before its release, guitarist John Webb said in a phone interview.

PRE consists of Webb, Kevin Hendrick on bass, Akiko Matsuura on vocals and Robin Christian on drums.

The band got its name from a documentary called “1991: The Year Punk Broke,” after seeing one of the bands, Gumball, perform a song called, “Pre,” Webb said.

Before he and Hendrick formed PRE, Webb became interested in music when his parents listened to The Beach Boys.

Hendrick was raised in the suburbs of London, next to London Heathrow Airport.

“It’s a pretty boring area to grow up in,” he said.

Webb wasn’t interested in high school sports and started hanging out with “weird kids” and listening to punk rock, he said.

Hendrick’s emergence into the music scene didn’t get off to a good start.

“I was making terrible bands, singing really badly,” he said.

That changed when Webb and Hendrick began playing together, Hendrick said.

After the band was fully formed, they were asked to release an album immediately, Webb said. This led to “Epic Fits” being recorded in one day and the process was not pretty.

“There were a lot of crazy things happening,” Webb said. “Instruments were being broken while we recorded.”

The band is currently on its “PRE back in the USA” tour with opening band, The Mae Shi.

PRE will perform two songs from “Epic Fits” while the rest will be from the upcoming album, which Webb said he is very proud of.

“We were able to put some more thought into this one,” he said.

The second album also had them step away from the crazy events that occurred during the recording of the first album, Webb said.

“Hope Freaks” was recorded by Steve Albini, who engineered album recordings for bands such as the Pixies and Nirvana.

Albini was a lot of help in getting this album recorded, Hendrick said.

“It was quite amazing to work with him,” he said. “He really did us justice.”

PRE doesn’t have any influences when it comes to creating music, Webb said.

“We’re just five people in a room, lashing out on our instruments,” he said. “If we create something that we all agree on, we’ll go with it.”

Influences might have made the members feel restricted to wanting to sound like the bands they like, Webb said.

“We don’t want to sound like this band or that,” he said. “We want to sound like ourselves.”

When PRE played at the Crux last year, audience members began throwing marshmallows at them for an unknown reason, Webb said.

“It kind of sucked,” he said. “All of our shoes and equipment got caked.”

If the audience decides to do it this time around, the band will be ready, Webb said.

Some people who had the chance to see PRE in Chico last year were impressed by the performance. One was Ty Gorton, the co-director of TiON. Gorton is more of a fan of The Mae Shi, but he likes seeing PRE live, especially Matsuura.

“She unleashes this insane amount of energy,” he said. “She really puts herself in her entire performance.”

David Wangberg can be reached at <a href= “mailto:[email protected]”>[email protected]</a>