Talking to FACT about new album Odd Blood, Brooklyn trio Yeasayer reveal that they wanted to make a “sparer sounding”, more minimal album than acclaimed debut All Hour Cymbals, obsessing more “over all the little sounds and arrangements”.

The band’s Anand Wilder claims that “with Odd Blood, we had a lot more time to obsess over all the little sounds and arrangements. When we were upstate recording, we enlisted the help of a professional engineer, Steve Revitte, who gave us perspective and a fresh pair of ears, and helped us execute some of the sounds we were envisioning. We also benefited from taking time off from recording to work out the songs in a live setting, and we had the luxury of being able to go back to the recordings to make change…

“The mixing process was much slower paced; we took about a month making rough mixes, beta mixes, final mixes, with our mixing engineer Britt Myers. We could go home with a mix, listen on different speakers, ipod headphones, then come back in with little changes to be made. We also weren’t afraid to cut songs out of the album entirely at the last minute, and replace them with songs that we hadn’t worked on at all while we were upstate.”

“There’s a perception of Yeasayer as some sort of freak-folk, hippie outfit, a label that we’ve always been uncomfortable with.”

“We definitely wanted to make a sparer sounding album, with fewer instruments and fewer voices. We wanted to make each sound count, each sound be treated in an  interesting way, so that you couldn’t exactly tell what was going on. We wanted our songs to be shorter, and dancier, with more prominent beats and lead vocal lines. We wanted the songs to be more direct, and commit more wholeheartedly to a style or sentiment.”

The band go on to reveal that a reoccurring theme of the record is paranoia, and that some songs on the album are “reaction[s] to the perception of Yeasayer as some sort of freak-folk, hippie outfit, a label that we’ve always been uncomfortable with.”

More will be revealed in the full FACT interview nearer Odd Blood‘s February release.