Alex Trimble of Two Door Cinema Club performs at the Leeds Festival at Bramhall Park on Aug. 28, 2011 in Leeds, England. Photo by Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage.

This story originally appeared in the Oakland Tribune.

The way singer Alex Trimble sees it, the isolation that came with starting a band in Northern Ireland – something that hurt many of his predecessors – ended up helping his dance-rock band, Two Door Cinema Club.

While others weren’t sure what to do after reaching success in the small country, his band used Northern Ireland’s borders to shield itself from the glaring spotlight of the United Kingdom’s band-making – and breaking – press.

“We saw it as a chance to hide away until we were ready,” said Trimble, whose emerging band will perform at the Warfield in San Francisco Sept. 23. “So we took our time and wrote the best songs we could until we were ready to get out there.”

Maybe partially due to The Troubles – the long and violent rift between Catholics and Protestants – Northern Ireland suffered from a lack of access to outside arts such as music, theater and film. Not a lot of bands came out of the country either, Trimble said. Trimble and his bandmates, bassist Kevin Baird and guitarist Sam Halliday, didn’t dare dream about record label executives coming to Northern Ireland to offer Two Door Cinema Club a deal.

“We were kind of determined to just make some really good music and to break that mold, break out of that country and get to wherever we wanted to go,” he said.

Two Door Cinema Club formed in 2007, but the trio of Trimble, Halliday and Baird had been friends for several years and had already been in a band together.

Their story goes like this: Trimble and Halliday were friends since elementary school summer camp in a small town outside Belfast. Baird studied music with Trimble and began to spend time with him and Halliday to get the attention of a few girls they were friends with.

“We were the only three kids in our school that were listening to underground and unknown music,” Trimble said. “We had discovered all these bands like (Texas post-hardcore named) At the Drive-In, and they’re bands that people don’t really know in Northern Ireland. A lot of people were listening to pop music, and that was it.”

The three friends, along with drummer pal Patrick Thompson, played in a post-punk band modeled after the likes of At The Drive-In and Nirvana – “raw, with a lot of screaming” – for three years before Thompson left, and the trio changed its focus to include more melodic pop sounds. By that time, they were listening to bands such as Bloc Party, Death Cab for Cutie, Daft Punk and Phoenix, which made music that was fresh and different to the Northern Ireland boys.

“We didn’t want to just stick to that one genre anymore; we wanted to bring all of our influences together and make music that was going to make us a lot more happy,” Trimble said.

The trio named itself after a local independent movie theater where the friends met – although the theater was actually called Tudor Cinema, and the name was mispronounced by Halliday – and began to work on new music with up-tempo beats and catchy melodies that were laced with electronica, Afro-beats and synth sounds.

The majority of the songs that would end up making it onto the band’s debut album, 2010’s “Tourist History,” such as “Something Good Can Work,” are of the self-motivational variety.

“We needed to keep remembering that we had to believe in ourselves if we were going to get anywhere,” Trimble said. “We were mostly the only people interested in what we were doing.”

Nearly two years later, they toured outside of Northern Ireland for the first time, traveling to mainland Europe and the United Kingdom. By this time, they were able to have their pick of record labels, and signed to French label Kitsuné Music, home to one of their influences, Phoenix. They added a fourth band member, drummer Benjamin Thompson, who performs at live shows but is not involved in songwriting or the band’s videos.

Trimble said that had the band started in England, the trio would not have been able to hide from the jaws of the hungry music industry, and would have been old news by now.

“They pick you up when you’re too green and that’s never a good thing,” he said. “We were quite polished and a seemingly professional band by the time we entered that arena.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.