Pitchfork: Are there any particular trends that came and went since 2009 that truly drive home how long it’s been since Get Color?

John Famiglietti: Witch house came and went.

Jake Duzsik: We played with Iceage when they brought us over to Copenhagen for a DIY show in 2011, and now they have three albums—and we don't even have three albums.

JF: When you take that long, you keep absorbing, and new shit is changing around you, and you're like, “Hey man, we gotta update.” You hear that about movies that take forever to be made or—this sounds really nerdy—the Duke Nukem Forever video game. The dude [George Broussard] lost his mind because he wanted to have the most next-level shooter. He was supposed to make it in '98 and it came out in 2011. Every year he would freak out and keep updating it because he had the hottest new mechanics. And then it came out and it was fuckin' terrible. That was always in the back of my mind, like, “Oh no, there's this new genre out! We need to have the hottest shit!” Obviously we're always responding to new trends, but we have our own sound aesthetic, so we're not so much like, "Can't wait until this moombahton jam is the hot genre of the second.”

HEALTH: "Die Slow" (via SoundCloud)

Pitchfork: Considering the more melodic direction of this record, are you hoping to reach a bigger audience than before?

Jupiter Keyes: Who wouldn't want that? We're making music because we love making music, but you want people to like it.

JD: We all started making music because it was the most important thing to us. You know what it feels like to hear a song and have an emotional response and want to listen to that song all day? Somehow communicating that to someone else is the greatest hope. It’s not from a cynical standpoint of making more money, but it's like, that happens.

Pitchfork: Who are your role models for melodic songwriting?

JF: We saw Depeche Mode because Crystal Castles were opening for them, and that was a rediscovery—they’re touchstones of combining melodic and electronic [elements] in rock song contexts.

JD: Not to say we’re going to try to write songs that sound like them, but the connection is [like] with industrial and Nine Inch Nails; you had really fucking crazy bands like Throbbing Gristle and Skinny Puppy, and then [Nine Inch Nails] introduced melody to it.

JF: Also, a lot of regular-ass pop music. I love all the Rihanna hits. We love [Katy Perry’s] "Teenage Dream".

JK: I love the technology of music, these think tanks of people, these formulaic things going on. There’s this arms race of how pop music is written these days, and it's really interesting to get deep with that kind of stuff. You can't help the fact that these people are all working together to make really gratifying shit.

JD: You can be cynical about it, but you still have to hit upon that good idea.

JF: No matter what you're doing, you gotta win the lottery with anything in art: underground, mainstream, whatever.

JK: But with engineered pop music, it's not the lottery. It's like professional poker gambling. They know exactly what they need to do to create the situation where they are most likely to create a hit, and they're doing really good with it. If you have the money, you can hire all the right people and you just make hit after hit after hit for a time period.

JF: It's more like a Magic deck because you can buy the cards and put them in your deck and increase your odds with money, but you still have to build that deck and exploit that part of the system to win.

JD: Or maybe it's like a drug cartel where you gotta figure all these different ways to smuggle shit through the border, and some people's lives might get destroyed, but that one truck gets through and it's like, "That's all we needed. Fuck those other guys."