Everyone’s heard about the dreaded sophomore slump, when a band hits it big with their debut album but fails to reproduce the magic on their second go-around. With pressure coming from both the record company and fans—not to mention the rigors of touring around that first record—it can be hard to find the time and inspiration to make quality music.

Luckily for John Pelant, the primary songwriter for Minneapolis-based group Night Moves, he and his band were given ample leeway from their label, Domino, to find the right sound for their follow-up to 2012’s Colored Emotions, and Pelant believes that it was for the better. “It was frustrating at the time,” he admits. “But I think the record we made is better than the one we would have made, had they let us go in the studio right after we finished touring Colored Emotions.”

Instead, Pelant spent the ensuing months and years holed up in his basement, writing and rewriting songs and sharing them with his musical partner and Night Moves’ bassist, Micky Alfano. “There are definitely [times] where I’ll be like, ‘Dude, we got it. We don’t need to rearrange everything again; this version’s great,’” Alfano says. “Then, he’ll do two more after that and I’ll think this new one is better than the first one. The advantage to having so much time to work on stuff is that it encouraged John to push himself into some different territories that he hadn’t really worked in before.”

Pennied Days, the band’s sophomore effort, does venture into new territory while keeping the free and airy spirit that made their debut so likable. In the studio with producer John Agnello—who has worked with the likes of Kurt Vile, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Okkervil River—the band took Pelant’s rough, but meticulously wrought, demos and built a fleshed-out album. “We were able to make a hybrid,” says Pelant of the process of using some of his basement recordings and redoing other portions. “That was a cool thing with Agnello, that we were able to get the song the best it could have possibly been—the best of both worlds.” With a more pianoand-keyboard-heavy sound that reflects Pelant’s evolving songwriting process, Pennied Days shows a maturing side of the Night Moves duo, who were only 21 and 23 when they wrote Colored Emotions. “It still has a lot of woody, warm, natural-sounding stuff,” Pelant says. “But it’s a better synthesis of that kind of space-and-folk-rock shit that was present on the first one.”