"I'm looking at my daughter and going, 'You are so perfect and innocent but, eventually, life is going to happen to you. And there's nothing I can do about that.'" Andy Hull says this with the same combination of sincerity and absurdism that he says most things, both on and off his records. He's sitting next to his brother-in-law and long-time collaborator in Manchester Orchestra, Robert McDowell, at a pub in Manhattan and both of them are alternating sips of Belgian beer with surreptitious drags on electronic cigarettes. Hull stares directly at me and speaks a soft Atlantan drawl. "I can try my best to protect [her] and do whatever I can," he says, "but the winter is coming for you, as it comes for all of us." A gentle, overwhelmed smile forms in the middle of his unkempt beard as he realizes the weight of that line, the Game of Thrones allusion within it, and the size of the stakes he's set up.

A Black Mile to the Surface, Manchester Orchestra's fifth studio album, deals with this looming existential terror with a now-typical obliqueness. On one hand, it's a concept album about a small, wintry town in South Dakota that none of Manchester Orchestra's members have ever so much as driven through; on the other, it's a memoir trapped between a stream of first- and second-person pronouns. It's the most lyrically intricate and sonically ambitious record that the band have made. It's also their best.

In many ways, it had to be. Hull started Manchester Orchestra in 2004, his last year of high school, and brought a group of his friends in to back him up early on—that's the "orchestra" that he imagined around himself. Over the last 13 years, the band has worked its way through God-fearing acoustic reckonings, beautifully harmonic rock music, and crushing distortion, always keeping a self-deprecating, sardonic humor close by. With four studio albums—plus three solo records from Hull, two from McDowell, two LPs alongside Kevin Devine as Bad Books, and countless cult-adored demos from the band—Manchester Orchestra were approaching a creative wall.

Hull, now 30, has been married to his wife, Amy, since 2008; his daughter Mayzie was born three years ago. This time around, he tried to write more love songs to his wife and songs of wonder to his daughter. "It sounds bad," he says, "but that wasn't really that inspiring to me. It was like, 'Man, they know I love them!'" So he tried to jolt himself into something different. He remembered what brutal winters were like—he'd spent seven years in Canada as a child when his father had moved to Toronto to pastor. "I remember, every year, the summers were fantastic, and the falls would be amazing, and you'd start to get into the winter and it's like… oh." South Dakota, he figured, was pretty cold. He searched online for pictures of the Midwest state in the winter. It locked in immediately.

With a setting in mind, Hull went about writing lyrics for something that he saw existing between Twin Peaks, the Album and Fargo, the Album: cold, strange, darkly comic. "Fargo, the Album was sort of a story [about] the desolate, the darkness, the 'Oh my God, it's so cold.' And then Twin Peaks the album was the fantastic, imaginative, ulterior, almost magic part of it." Lead, South Dakota—the town that Hull built the record around—is a small town with a population a little over 3,000, and it is bitterly cold. But its existence is stranger than that. The home of the Sanford Underground Research Facility, experiments are done on dark matter—otherworldly particles—underground. Hull had a new world in his head.