Painted Ruins is coming out on RCA rather than your longtime label Warp. At this point, what does it mean to go from an indie to a major?

ED: First things first, we recorded and did the whole album without even playing it for any label.

CT: It was completely finished before we shopped it around.

ED: We didn’t want to sign somewhere and then have some sort of voice over our shoulder telling us what to do. So we did everything with no expectations, having no idea who would want it.

Also, major deals are now the indie deals; the deals they present are like flip-flopped. I won’t say who, but one indie came with us with the most crazy [deal]—it was like, “What is this, Warner Brothers in 1992?”

CT: Indies are starting to adapt 360 deals, which I don’t agree with at all.

ED: I support the music industry. I still buy music. Bless indies, bless record stores, all that stuff. It’s just funny because, especially at our age, you have this idea like, “Oh, going to this label means you’re going to be amongst these people.” Whereas now, considering that most people stream things, the label name is literally almost hidden.

What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the music business since Shields?

ED: Oh my god. The streaming thing. It was already huge but now… I mean, I kind of personally tuned out of the music world for a couple of years and was focused on life. I wasn’t oblivious, but I wasn’t checking and seeing, like, “Who released what now?” I’d slowly live with a record and realize that it came out a year and a half before.

But once we were suddenly back to having to deal with it ourselves, I was shocked to hear that, like, playlists are the new radio and all these weird things. I still don’t really stream. Generally speaking, I still buy digital albums and I like to have them with me and sit with them and not have banners of other things being like, “Try this! Check out this mix!” It’s stimulus overload. I like sitting with two or three records for a couple of weeks. That’s still how I process music. I still consume it like an old fart.

CT: I only buy vinyl, so I guess I’m the old fart.

ED: I just still like to listen to how they want the tracklisting to be. And given that our albums aren’t necessarily like, you listen to it once and you love it, I always want to give an album at least five listens. Because it unfolds upon you. You keep discovering things. I’m buying it and committing to it, and I want to at least give that much of my time and know whether it’s something I want to keep in my regular rotation or not, just like I would hope people would do the same for us. But people can do whatever they want to do. I can’t control it.

What do you think is missing from the current pop landscape?

ED: I don’t have a problem with the current landscape, per se. It’s always changing, and it’s not necessarily my place to say. But there’s a piece of me—and I’ve been feeling this way for 15 years—that misses the time when, thank god, I was a little 13-year-old and I could turn on the radio and hear “Cannonball” by the Breeders. That just doesn’t happen anymore. It was so cool to hear PJ Harvey and Björk and all these amazing, wonderful personalities doing really avant-garde music on the radio in the ’90s. There’s a lot of pop right now that’s very avant-garde, especially rap, and there’s R&B and there’s a ton of really innovative, amazing stuff. I’m just saying, in the more guitar-heavy world, it would be fun to hear more—let’s get Deerhoof on the radio.