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In January, three months after I first met Annuals in New York, I came to see them in their hometown, or roughly so: it was at the Cat’s Cradle and the other clubs in Carrboro—and Chapel Hill, home to UNC, which Carrboro abuts—that all of them got their start playing music. While the band waited to do their soundcheck, we sat around in the green room, which looked much like green rooms in seedy rock clubs anywhere: a dorm-room fridge, haphazardly arrayed scraps of torn carpet, fourth-hand upholstered furniture with springs distended out the undersides.

“Whose Pop-Tarts are these?” asked Anna Spence, the slender red-head who played keyboards in the band.

“Mine,” said Kenny.

“Ours,” said Adam, whose preshow preparations consisted of pacing around while using a lighter to burn decorative holes in his white collared shirt. “That’s our rider, baby! Pop-Tarts.”

By indie-rock standards, the past three months had been extraordinarily good to Annuals: an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, a full-page article in Rolling Stone. But they were still, as Mike had put it, “climbing the hill,” and the band’s patience with touring seemed to be fraying somewhat. “There’s a plan to take a big break,” Adam said, “because we’ve got all these other projects.” He was speaking chiefly of Sedona, in which he drummed—“I’m dying to get back behind the set,” he said. But he rattled off two other side projects as well: bassist Mike had a “folk-pop” act called First Person Plural, plus Adam was planning an electronica act that he said was called Tundra.

Annuals was coming through their hometown with almost no fanfare, playing as the opener for the Dears—an unfortunately maudlin rock act from Montreal whose songs, as a friend aptly put it later during the show, resembled nothing so much as “a musical about an indie-rock band.” I couldn’t help but think about how the whole notion of a homegrown scene, here as elsewhere, had disappeared. Fifteen years ago, to be sure, national bands came through the Chapel Hill-area clubs, but it also meant something to speak of a Chapel Hill band, and a Chapel Hill sound; the lo-fi pop sensibility of Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, and Polvo defined a local identity. Today in Chapel Hill, former members of Superchunk run Merge Records—arguably the nation’s most influential indie label—but its bands hail from around the United States, Canada, and even Europe. Annuals, whose label was run until recently out of a cramped one-bedroom apartment on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, summoned no more excitement in their own hometown than they did anywhere else.

The members were too young to have experienced this erosion of the local firsthand, but they grasped its import; Zack Oden, for instance, noted that thanks to KEXP, they had sold more records in Seattle than at home. As music fans, certainly, they all recognized how the Internet shaped their own listening habits: the roaming for the new band that always lurks just around the corner. “There’s two sides to that shit,” Adam said, when I asked him about the Internet. “One side is it’s a really wonderful way to discover all kinds of music. But then it also completely taints you. It makes you not enjoy music as long.”

“It shortens your attention span,” added Zack. “Because you can always access new stuff.”

“Just like everything else, every day,” said Adam, with resignation. He and Anna were now drawing with colored pencils around the burnt holes in his shirt.

“What are you putting on your shirt?” asked Kenny.

“Wizard’s fire, baby,” said Adam. “That’s what I was wounded by.”

I asked Adam, finally, about the name Annuals, a question I had been turning over in my mind ever since I first heard of the band.

“Actually, I remember the moment that I thought of the word,” Adam said. “I was coming home from school, and I was looking at one of my mom’s flowers. And I had just, like, started recording my little side-project shit. And I thought: Annuals.”

I felt relieved to learn that the name did not