“There is certainly an ego thing that always has existed and continues to exist in this band,” says Local Natives singer and co-founder Taylor Rice. “It’s this push-and-pull force for everybody. We want to collaborate, and that vibe is great, but you’ve got strong-headed people who want to get their musical visions across.”

Local Natives was founded as a democracy and, indeed, there’s an element of politics involved in balancing so many creative forces. The acclaimed indie-rock outfit juggles three multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriters—Rice, Kelcey Ayer, Ryan Hahn—with a rhythm section (bassist Nik Ewing, drummer Matt Frazier) that contributes crucially to their emotive, harmony-stacked arrangements.

That sense of healthy competition fueled the band’s fir t two albums, 2009’s Gorilla Manor and 2013’s Hummingbird—but creative strains lurked underneath, as the songwriters struggled to relinquish their material—to sacrifice their personal visions for a collective one. With their effusive third LP, Sunlit Youth, the quintet faced an even loftier challenge: controlling an artistic detonation. Over a year and a half of writing and recording sessions—spread across Thailand, Nicaragua, Malaysia, Hawaii and their native California—the band wound up with “at least three times the amount of songs” than usual, somewhere between 40 and 50.

“With this record, we’ve been in a healthy place, in general,” Rice says. “When other band members contribute to what we would say are ‘our songs,’ they become something else and something better. It’s what makes a band a band. It’s what separates us from being solo artists tacking a bunch of songs together. [Learning to compromise] has been a really healthy growing pain to go through, and it was hard for certain band members to accept at fir t. Once we did, the creativity level really exploded. That came from unleashing people’s individual creative potential a little more, while still maintaining that collaborative spirit.”

The chief catalyst for this rebirth was a “serendipitous” trip to Thailand toward the end of 2014.

“We were just going where our lives were leading us,” Rice admits. “We got this festival offer [for urbanscapes] in Malaysia. We hadn’t played there before but wanted to. But we were just digging into writing, and it’s a really long flight. You basically give up a full week to play one day in Malaysia. But I wanted to, and we were trying to justify doing it. And I just remember that, through a friend of a friend, this guy had this amazing studio that he’d built in Thailand. I looked up the flight, and it as about an hour and a half from Kuala Lumpur, so I said, ‘What if we justify this by making it this writing trip?’ We’d been writing at home in LA a little bit in our studio, but we’d been looking for a place to get out. It just fell into our laps. That Thailand trip kicked things off.”

The rejuvenated group spent two weeks in the exotic locale, which sparked the album’s two poignant lead singles, “Past Lives” and “Villainy,” both sung primarily by Rice. The tracks foreshadow the band’s ultimate path: the former a polished, arena-sculpted anthem that explores heady topics like predestination and reincarnation; the latter a resilient electro-rock gut-punch, their first-ever to not feature guitar.

“We are a band, and a song doesn’t sound like Local Natives until, at some point, we put it through that filter,” Rice says. “But we were excited about broadening our musical palette. Listening to electronic music and hip-hop also let a song like ‘Villainy’ happen. We took this Jon Hopkins-inspired beat and track that Ryan made, which we were all so pumped on, and worked these Beach Boys harmonies and melodies over it. And it tied it together and made it feel like us, even though it’s something we hadn’t done before.”

The other essential visit was to Nicaragua toward the end of 2015, after Hahn suggested they check out a studio recommended by a friend. “This guy said he would give us a ridiculous deal if we came and tried it out,” Rice says. “It magically happened.”

Ewing is quick to note that Local Natives weren’t gallivanting around the globe on some kind of cultural conquest. “This wasn’t like a Beatles’ White Album, where you go to India and you hear the sitar,” he says. “It’s not like there was a huge influence, but it was just about unplugging and getting away from our daily lives.”

But through all the country/ studio-hopping, the band came to a moment of clarity. Instead of trying to write what fans or critics or label heads might consider a “Local Natives song”—the layered guitars and keys, the requisite vocal harmonies, the all-organic instrumentation—why not throw out the rule book altogether?

“I think most guidelines are gone,” says Ewing. “Kelcey and Ryan were just writing a lot, and they’d show me something, and it’d be, ‘That’s cool, but it’s not a Local Natives song.’ But early on in the record process, we said, ‘Does that even matter?’ If we’re super stoked on it, and if it’s connecting with us, there’s no ‘We need to check these boxes. We need two guitars, three harmonies.’ There weren’t these requirements for it to be a Local Natives song. Whatever created a spark inside of us, we ran with it.”

It was a logical move following the brooding, turbulent Hummingbird, an album born out of personal strain: namely the death of Ayer’s mother and the departure of co-founding bassist Andy Hamm. “I really love that record,” Rice says. “But it was the result of us dealing with a pretty dark time, and we had to get out these songs. We had to wrench them out. Some songs, we would slave away on for months, and it was so cathartic in that way, dealing with some difficult times we’d gone through. And we’d gotten that out of our system, and it was a really different mind-set and vibe coming out of that.”

Naturally, after the emotional exorcism of recording that LP, the band was eager for brightness. For the last few years, they’d been soaking in new sounds: psychedelic soul, electronica, hip-hop. Kanye West’s cold, minimalist 2013 LP, Yeezus, was a huge influence, and the group even recorded the Grateful Dead’s “Stella Blue” for Aaron and Bryce Dessner’s Day of the Dead tribute album. (“I’ve always been drawn to the weird, jazzy, descending chord progression of ‘Stella Blue,’” Ewing says. “It’s a shame Grateful Dead are mostly seen as a psychedelic jamband, because their catalog is filled with so many vulnerable, honest songs. In the spirit of the Dead, we completely flipped the song on its head—basically removing all the guitars as a starting point.”) During their numerous plane trips around the world, the band began experimenting with beats and textures on their laptops, setting a foundation for their sleekest, least rock-oriented album to date.

“I hadn’t thought about the album in terms of polish before, but I think maybe some of that is just that we’re getting better at it,” Rice says. “It’s our third album, and we’re starting to learn the ropes of doing it. We co-produced this record with a friend of ours named Brian Josephs. Even though we did a lot of it at these different studios around the world, we also did a lot with our own setup in LA at our studio. We’d been pushing ourselves to experiment with production, and we went into a lot of new territory we hadn’t been in before. Maybe these are more expressive, optimistic songs. There’s an element of that, especially coming off of Hummingbird, which was a much more dense, cathartic record.”

In a more positive headspace, unshackled from the public’s perception of what they should sound like, and with hard drives full of sprawling fragments, Local Natives were excited to try any unexpected idea that popped into their heads.

The album’s melodic centerpiece, “Dark Days,” finds Ayer romanticizing overcast California days—with a dose of “fear for the afterlife”—over tumbling, programmed drums and pillowy synth pads. It also features a seductive guest spot from Nina Persson, singer of Swedish pop-rock act The Cardigans.

“In some ways, it’s the simplest, lightest, breeziest song we’ve ever done,” Rice says. “We were very excited: There are no chords in that song. It’s three bass notes that repeat over and over. It has this very simple groove, but that pushed us—that and the chorus, singing about fear of the afterlife. There’s some heavy, existential things being explored on that song.”

“I remember hearing that demo around a year and a half ago,” adds Ewing. “I was very struck by it, but there were no lyrics, only hums. It was like a classic, timeless song. There were some obvious references, like Talking Heads or Fleetwood Mac, which is nothing new for us. But I love when you get a vibe and melody or aesthetic of a song, and that can be misleading. It sounds like summertime or happiness, and the lyrics are such a contrast to that.”

The album is filled with similar surprises: the droning guitar loops of “Masters,” the unadorned acoustic strums and crackling snares of “Ellie Alice,” the glistening synths of “Jellyfish” the latter assisted by Swedish electro-R&B masters Little Dragon). But the LP’s most shocking departure is “Coins,” which finds yer belting soulful runs over Hahn’s D’Angelo-inspired guitar lick. The initial effect is jarring, as if your iTunes has suddenly shuffled unprompted. And the track nearly nudged the band too far outside its comfort zone, even in this free-spirited new state.

“That one is one of those great examples of where a song just comes together so quickly,” Rice says. “Ryan saw D’Angelo at the FYF Festival [in 2015], and, the next day, he wrote this guitar riff and melody. I was not in the room, but Ryan basically put the whole thing together in one day. I remember getting an email with the song basically done. And that’s so uncommon for that to happen. At first, everybody was like, ‘This is cool, but I feel like we’ve crossed a line, possibly. I don’t know if this can live in a Local Natives world. Does this make sense?’ But over the next week, everybody was jamming on that song. We thought, ‘This totally works for us. It’s new, but it feels great.’ We made a couple of production tweaks, working on the tune. Working on the harmonies brought it into the Local Natives world. Kelcey has such an amazing, soulful voice, but he doesn’t often get to show off in that way.”

Local Natives have always written from a place of vulnerable—at times painful— intimacy. As a listener, it’s easy to feel like a voyeur listening to a transcript of a therapy session—like on Hummingbird’s “Three Months,” a raw piano confessional that finds yer grappling with his mom’s death. The specificity of their lyrics is a calling card—but on Sunlit Youth, they’ve begun to funnel their emotions further outward.

For Rice, the best example of this is “Past Lives,” which was inspired by the eerie fatefulness of love—and, well, the philosophical themes of two projects starring Matthew McConaughey.

“The emotion that began the lyrics for ‘Past Lives’ is that feeling when you’re living your life, and there’s thousands of people all the time,” he says. “There’s this sea of people constantly around you, and, at some moment, you connect with somebody. It’s almost seemingly random. Out of this huge sea of lives, you connect with somebody all of a sudden and then fall in love. Then, shortly after this moment, it feels crazy that throughout all your different paths you came together. Very shortly after that, it begins to feel like it was so inevitable. You can’t imagine not having this person in your life. That transition is so crazy, the way our lives intermingle with each other.

“That song came out of thinking, ‘What is that force that makes you connect with somebody? Do we live in these cycles and loops over and over? What are those forces working to make you have that connection?’” he continues. “I get emotional listening to it, and it might be my favorite song on the record. There are a bunch of philosophical influences on that song. That season one of True Detective: ‘Time is a flat circle.’ Not that I subscribe to reincarnation, but I thought that concept was a beautiful way of describing it. Watching [Christopher Nolan’s] Interstellar really hit a nerve as well. It’s exploring those ideas of how we come to love the people we do, and if it’s inevitable.”

With Sunlit Youth, Local Natives have forged a bold, even risky, path forward— trusting a primarily indie-rock audience to follow them. But after a decade of struggling to manage so many creative personalities, Rice is only concerned that they impress themselves. “We can do whatever we want,” he says.

“We can mess around until something sounds fresh and exciting to us. People ask why we went to Nicaragua and Thailand—it was to remind us that there’s only one thing to follow, and that’s the spark of the thing that’s pulling you to feel super excited to create. That had to be the guiding principle of making music together.”