If Robin Pecknold made one great decision in the dumpster fire of a year that was 2016, it was surely to disengage almost entirely from the cultural conversation.

"I've been intentionally a little tuned out the last year or so," the quiet, bookish and, for the better part of the past few years, slightly reclusive singer says with a laugh. "I was kind of tuning out in order to be on our own trip." The trip he's referring to? That would be the writing and recording of Crack-Up, the long-awaited new album from his band, Fleet Foxes. Many fans of the folk-rock, choirboy-harmony-loving Seattle band thought this moment might never come. But the 31-year-old Pecknold insists that in the six years since their previous album, 2011's Helplessness Blues—even after he put the band on hold and certain members left, like drummer Josh Tillman, who now performs as Father John Misty—he "knew the whole time" Fleet Foxes would eventually reunite.

Phoenix's Pursuit of Perfect Pop Isn't Easy France's biggest rock band puts a lot of work into sounding so effortless.

But first, he wanted to focus on himself. So following a globetrotting tour that ended in 2012, rather than taking the more financially viable route and cranking out another album while the proverbial beard-rock iron was hot, Pecknold retreated to a small town in Northeast Washington. He had a feeling "there was some folk fatigue in the culture," so he spent the year in Port Townsend, taking a woodworking course by day and going on long runs at night. Later that year, in an attempt to discover whether there was more to him than a tasteful songwriter, Pecknold moved to New York's East Village and enrolled in an undergraduate program at Columbia University.

But, as he explains on a recent afternoon, Pecknold always felt Fleet Foxes had "unfinished business"—namely, digging deeper into his varied musical influences. Enter Crack-Up. The album, whose title comes from a 1936 essay by F. Scott Fitzgerald, features more nuanced rhythmic dynamics and unorthodox song structure. On the album's standout opening track, "I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar" the band—which includes guitarist Skyler Skjelset, bassist Christian Wargo, and multi-instrumentalists Casey Wescott and Morgan Henderson—experiments with vastly different tempos, tenors and emotions all within a six-minute-plus musical odyssey. In his conversation with GQ, Pecknold pulled back the curtain on the making of the new Fleet Foxes album, drew comparisons between his band and Star Wars, and explained how he's made peace with criticism.

GQ: Does it feel like a bit of a time warp to be returning to Fleet Foxes after several years away?

Robin Pecknold: Well, it doesn't feel like going back in time necessarily. Honestly, it's kind of nostalgic playing the old songs for the first time again in rehearsal. I think we're trying to structure this album—and the next album as well as we move forward—as not looking back too much. But it has been an adjustment. We did a photo shoot for the first time recently. It was like "Oh, damn, this again."

At what point in the six years since your last album did you decide to make a new Fleet Foxes album?

I think I knew the whole time. But I had this idea of what I wanted the record to be. Or rather what I wanted a hypothetical record to be like, and an idea of how I wanted the hypothetical touring and the promotion to go. But it just took a longer period of personal growth, of reflection, of research and work and trying to learn more and trying to integrate different influences that didn't feel forced to be in the right frame of mind, to make a record.