ABOVE: DAUGHTER. PHOTO COURTESY OF FRANCESCA JANE ALLEN.

It’s been three years since U.K. indie-folk trio Daughter released its debut album If You Leave, but with the group’s forthcoming LP, it’s like they never left. Not to Disappear (out this Friday, January 15) features the same haunting vocals from lead singer Elena Tonra, but with added confidence. The band has found comfort in transparency, perhaps something that resulted from the imminent success If You Leave. On Not to Disappear, the trio explores the motions of loneliness, sex, and heartbreak, collecting memories and moments that fuel the songwriting and melodies. Similar to If You Leave, Not To Disappear is full of melancholy, but also strength. You see Tonra finding herself once again before the end of the 10 tracks. While many bands cite other musicians as influences, Daughter decidedly blocked out listening to new artists in order to create something they feel is truly original.

Before their Radio City show with Ben Howard in late 2015, we caught up with Tonra and band members Igor Haefeli and Remi Aguilella about writing a second record, lyrical over-sharing, and finding confidence in music.

ILANA KAPLAN: It’s been three years since your debut came out. Can you tell me about what the writing and recording process was like for you this time around?

ELENA TONRA: We officially started writing it about two years ago. We had come off touring for an extensive and intense amount of time. We stopped touring as much, we rented a space, and put all of our instruments, microphones and equipment in this space and made it a writing and demo-ing situation. It was great because we could go in at any hour we liked and if we had any ideas, we could make them there. That was kind of the start of the process. Each song had a different way of coming about. In some, the music was written first while others it was the lyrics. We didn’t want to overthink anything too much—we just wanted to, writing-wise, chuck out as many ideas as possible. It was really cool that we had a lot of different stuff going on in our heads. There were some tracks that were really far away from what we’ve done before and some that were really folky, and others that didn’t make it onto the records.