Anyone looking to make a quick buck would do well to buy a trash bag of earplugs and hock them at huge markups in Mid-City tonight. Londoners The Big Pink and New York's A Place to Bury Strangers, two  exciting and pulverizingly loud rock bands, will kick off a fiendishly curated co-headlining tour at the El Rey Theatre tonight.

But on the bands' latest albums -- "A Brief History of Love" and "Exploding Head," respectively -- there are real streaks of romance, misanthropy and grandeur beneath the brutality. To steel our poor little eardrums for the occasion, we got frontmen Robbie Furze of the Big Pink and Oliver Ackermann of A Place to Bury Strangers on the phone together to talk about the pleasures of kicking the bejesus out of your reverb unit, Alan Moulder's black magic behind a mixing desk and how to cut through the chaos to make a song break your skull -- and heart -- alike.

You both put out really dense, sonically involved records last year. What strategies do you use to re-create them live?

Ackermann: I take it with a completely different approach. In a live atmosphere, you can do completely different things, depending on the space. We try to create as much chaos as possible, and you can play around with so many things to do that.

Furze: For us, live, it's far more aggressive than on the record. All the samples get effected again through an effect chain; I use a lot more pedals live than on record. There's just a lot more going on.

Ackermann: Yeah, there's something about the energy of a place where the kids are going crazy, it's way more exciting than sitting in your room just tripping on sounds.