The Antlers, from left: Peter Silberman, Darby Cicci, and Michael Lerner. Photos by Marc Lemoine.

Peter Silberman wants to change everything: his guitar playing, the way he writes, his voice, the way he moves through the world—all of it. This becomes immediately apparent when I sit down to talk with him about the Antlers' new record Familiars. The entire conversation revolves around what he has either stopped doing or is planning on never doing again, a long list that only starts with the way the band makes music. "I'm trying to get myself out of conventional ways of thinking about life and death," the 28-year-old frontman tells me. To that end, he has been reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead—"I don't really claim any understanding of it, because it's super dense," he offers quickly—and absorbing it piecemeal.

As someone best known for writing a concept album set in a children's cancer ward, he's aware how this might sound. "I think we get pegged as being a 'sad band' because there's so much death in our records," he says. "But I find that there are different ways to look at death in your life, and they don't have to be depressing at all. They can be inspiring and make you even more appreciative of life as you have it."

It is this redemptive note that rings through Familiars, which is also permeated with an otherworldly, leave-taking quality that seems to have seeped into the band members themselves. When I meet Silberman in the Antlers’ studio space in Brooklyn, he is sipping tea alone, and he has the serene, slightly glazed look of someone who has just padded out of a yoga class and has yet to rejoin the world entirely. There is new age music playing quietly in the background. (When I catch up briefly with Darby Cicci, the band's multi-instrumentalist, on the phone later on, he sounds similarly placid.) Silberman name-checks writers like Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran and spiritual teacher Ram Dass in our conversation, as well as mind-expanding works like Enter the Void and “Twin Peaks”, all signs that he's “still pretty deep” into a new life philosophy that takes solace in what he once feared most.

Pitchfork: Peter, your singing has opened up considerably on Familiars. Was this a conscious choice, or a natural process?

Peter Silberman: Kinda both. I was burnt out on my falsetto as my default state of singing. I don't talk in that high register, so it's a bit removed for me. It can be something to hide behind. I felt like I wanted to used it sparingly, and to make it count when I did, and I felt the need to reconnect with my own voice and hear what it sounds like now. I always thought that your voice changed when you were a teenager and that was pretty much it. But my voice has changed a lot throughout my 20s, especially as I've been singing more.

Pitchfork: When was the first time you thought that you liked your own voice?

PS: It probably wasn't until this record.

Pitchfork: When you listen back to your previous albums, do you enjoy what you hear in your own voice?

PS: Nooo. Hospice isn't really an enjoyable record for me to listen to. The experience is so heavy at this point—a combination of emotional intensity and also like looking at an old picture of yourself. I like the sound of my voice on Burst Apart more, but I have a hard time listening to the things I was saying on that record, because I feel very far away from them. I was in a very fucked-up mindframe while making that record. It was after the band took off with Hospice, and we were in this whole new world of people actually paying attention. There was a lot of change happening that I didn't quite understand, and it threw me for a loop.

There's definitely a personal-philosophy component to my lyrics, and there's so much doubt and anxiety and fear and insecurity in Burst Apart. It even has a kind of nihilistic bent. So that record is really honest, because I didn't really have a chance to really reflect on what I was saying. It was just coming out of me. And they were the worst thoughts. I care about that record a lot and sonically love it, but I feel weird about it. I had strange motives in it.

Darby Cicci: We tried to force some lightness and optimism into Burst Apart, and there was a lot of fumbling along as we figured out how to be a studio band instead of a touring unit with that album. There was a lot of pressure. Hospice had such a clear story, and we were worried about being pigeonholed as a conceptual band. I also played a much bigger role on it, so it immediately sounded totally different. Putting out a second record is always such a serious moment: You become a band, whether you like it or not.

Pitchfork: Peter, do you anticipate that you'll make some philosophical peace with the guy who wrote those Burst Apart songs as you take them out on the road with the songs from Familiars?

PS: I hope so. On some level, Familiars is that peace-making process. I was trying to figure out, like, "How do you relate to yourself as you change your attitude? How do you not cringe at the things you've said in the past that you'd never say now?" Most people have their younger phases and move on from them into adulthood, but I'm in this strange position where I'm repeating history when I go on tour.

Pitchfork: You mentioned reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead. What led you to that book, and what did you take away from it?

PS: A lot of the things I was reading, like Aldous Huxley and Joseph Campbell, were referencing The Tibetan Book of the Dead, so I decided to pick it up. I'd also watched Enter the Void, and it's such a fixture in that movie. It comes up a lot in "Twin Peaks", too, which I've been obsessed with for a while. So I was like, “OK, there's something in this that seems to be pretty worth exploring for me.”

And I'm still working on it. I don't really claim any understanding of it, but I get little bits and pieces of things from it every time I pick it up. I was fascinated by the intermediate state of reality—the bardo—the 49 days after you die before you're reincarnated. I started thinking a lot about that period and about what an intermediate state of reality might be. Eventually, it evolved into the idea of an imagined meeting with a version of you that transcends death. If you were to meet yourself—and this is a version of you that has already seen you die, has already seen you be born, has that eagle-eye perspective on your entire life—what would they say about your life up until this point?

Pitchfork: How did all of that manifest itself in Familiars?

PS: I was trying to understand attachment in this record. We get attached to our memories, to our ideas of who we are, of who other people are. There's a buildup of thoughts about something that keeps you from seeing it as it truly is. I've been trying to clear away as much attachment as possible in the way that I think and act. Part of that is revisiting the past and letting go of things that I've unknowingly held on to for a long time. Most of the time you don't even realize you're holding onto something, it's just a quiet whisper in the back.

We're very good at distracting ourselves, which is a way of escaping, but there's no real way to escape yourself in the end. The more you try to escape yourself the more you'll be hideously confronted by whatever you're running away from, so I think it's better to face it head on.

Pitchfork: The new song "Doppelgänger" feels like it touches on a lot of this.

PS: Yeah, that song is about confronting the things in yourself that you fear the most. I know that I try to compartmentalize those pieces of my personality, like it's some other version of me. But if you can face your dark side head-on, you realize that it's all part of what's going on inside your head. It's something you need to learn to make friends with.

Going back to "Twin Peaks", I really gravitated towards the place that Cooper enters with the red drapes and the patterned floor; it plays throughout the entire show, and it basically is this intermediate reality—this place is where doppelgängers exist, alternate versions of people on the other side. I was so disturbed and fascinated by it, and it felt very relevant to what I was writing about. I really enjoy when an indescribable otherworldly place is translated into something that we as humans can understand; why would there be red curtains in this place where time doesn't exist? I was trying to write things that are familiar to anyone, but I was also trying to describe the void, which is a faux pas in Buddhism—this idea that if you try to explain Zen, then you've already missed the point. But it's still fun to try.