Mac DeMarco is back, and he’s unsurprisingly low-key about it. Yesterday, the recent-ish New York-to-Los Angeles transplant announced his third album, This Old Dog, the follow-up to 2015’s understated Another One EP and 2014’s slacker odyssey Salad Days. He also shared two lead singles off the new record, the dreamy title track and the drum machine-driven “My Old Man.”

Reached by phone later that day, between morning coffee and plans for a lunch of bánh mì with a friend, DeMarco seems characteristically unfazed by the pressures of a third LP. “Choruses? Fuck a chorus,” he says of the album. “What else? Bridge? I don’t think I've done a bridge on the last three albums.” Expect mainly acoustic guitars, along with plenty of synths—“but they are, like, pretty mellow.” DeMarco talked with Pitchfork about the making of This Old Dog, his take on Star Wars: Rogue One, and more.

For this album, I understand you gave the songs a little bit more time to breathe after you demoed them. Did that affect how they have turned out?

Mac DeMarco: That's the thing, a lot of the songs I did demo in New York, and then kind of had them sit. And then I tried to redo a bunch, because I moved to Los Angeles this summer. What I found was the more I tried to demo stuff, the less I liked it. So what I ended up doing was using a lot of components of the demo recording. That song “This Old Dog” that came out today, that's pretty much just like I recorded it on the floor of my bedroom in New York. I redid the drums and the bass.

Is this all you playing on the record?

Yeah, it’s all me. The only time I had somebody in this time was, my friend Shags [Chamberlain, who has worked with Ariel Pink, Weyes Blood, and the Avalanches] was here when I was mixing. It was the same as any other time, I guess. The drums are still sloppy. Everything is still sloppy. It's definitely me playing.

What else can you tell us about the album?

I think my favorite song on the record is the first song from side two, “Dreams From Yesterday.” I tried to do a bossa nova album when I was younger, maybe when I was 20 or something. But that one's a little bit bossa nova-y sounding, I suppose. There are two others on side B, one called “One More Love Song” that has real acoustic piano in it, which I’ve never recorded before. And then “On the Level”... it fits on the album, but it's a little bit different—kind of a sister song to [Salad Days standout] “Chamber of Reflection.”