MB: That's a good point. I don't think guitar solos used to be a big part of our band in the past... And I'm not sure why.

AD: I was maybe a little bit self-conscious. We've always avoided gratuitous noodling. This time, we were creating more space for things to happen. The way it was set up, it was so easy for me to go out, have a beer, and just play a guitar solo and be like, “Wait, that's kind of fun,” and just leave it on. In the past, we may have whittled those things down. There's a lot more interplay between everybody this time. That was part of the idea, just encouraging everybody to do whatever they felt like doing, and preserving it.

That's you playing guitar, Aaron?

AD: Yeah, my brother plays some sweet guitar solos on the record as well.

MB: Would you say that there are dueling guitar solos?

AD: There is a dueling guitar solo. But that was actually you, Matt.

MB: I directed the duel. That was fun. Yeah, there's guitar solos all over this record.

Matt, you've said this record is about marriage. A lot of the songs seem to be told in the first and second person. Was that intentional?

MB: The lyrics are direct and kind of intimate. Not all of the songs—I think there are as many silly, dumb, goofy lyrics on this as there usually are. But the serious stuff gets even more serious than usual. There is a lot of conversational stuff between people. I also collaborated more with Carin [Besser, writer and former New Yorker editor married to Berninger] from the very beginning on a lot of these songs. Writing lyrics with your wife does lead to talking about yourselves a lot. But this is not an autobiographical account of my personal marriage. It's almost about the marriage of the band.

One lyric on the new album that stuck out was, “I'm always mothering myself to bits.” Was self-care a theme?

MB: There's a lot of self-medicating. “I'll Still Destroy You” is lovingly talking about how we change our states of mind, whether it's weed or wine or whatever. It's an ingredient in my life. Sometimes we overindulge ourselves. I've always been okay with that in a funny way. I sing about that stuff a lot, and the dangers of it.

What’s “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” about?

MB: That one, for me, is a hibernation—the dark before the dawn sort of thing. That one's less about relationships than it is more of the strange way our world and our idea of identity mutates—sometimes overnight, as we've seen recently. It's an abstract portrait of a weird time we're in.

Would you characterize this as a political album?

MB: Everybody knows we're big liberals and I was a very outspoken Hillary supporter, and I still am. It's impossible for us to separate the songs we're writing from what's going on in the world. In a sense, it probably is a political album. But it's not a concept album or anything. There's political content in almost every song we've ever written on some level. It colors everything. There was no intention that this was more political than before.

In fact, after Trump won, some of the relief of finishing this record was to turn off all the politics for a while. There were some songs that had more of the political stuff that we just decided to wait on and put aside. A few weeks after the election, I stopped watching cable news and just unplugged. My way of dealing with the new situation we're in was to just work on something that I care about.