On the road, she and core members Geoff Graham, Nate Nelson, and recent addition Walker Teret are a tight-knit crew. “When we started out, we had no money at all, so we’d bring a portable kitchen,” Hunter remembers. “We’d plug in our little range at the club and make dinner together.” Since then, things have gotten a little less lo-fi in those realms too, though certain traveling traditions remain. “We always bring a Frisbee and a soccer ball on tour,” Hunter says. “We spend a lot of time talking about music in the way that only musicians talk about music. And we pass around the same books.” One book they’ve been reading, and rereading, is George W. S. Trow’s landmark cultural critique, Within the Context of No Context, which originally filled an entire issue of The New Yorker back in 1980. “It’s so on point,” Hunter says. “The way we embrace media, for instance: We want it to mean something, we go to it for these little flashes of meaning for something that used to be real but no longer is. It’s excruciating, but beautiful.”

While Nootropics was a far more cerebral album, each song plotted around different aspects of humans’ relationship to technology, with Escape From Evil, Hunter set out this time to consciously make a very private record within the context of a band. “I lost a person who had been part of my circle back in Houston, and another friend’s son had died. So writing the songs became a magical way of expressing for those people what it can be like to face that intensity of grief,” she says. “We are all nerds and it’s easy for us to be satisfied on an intellectual level, but we were thinking about how we were going to be spending a long time on the road with these songs, and we wanted to make them fun to play.”

The result is an album that feels celebratory and anthemic—building on the warm, textural, synth- and chorus-heavy sound of their first two outings—and some of the most straightforward pop songs Hunter’s ever written. The new single, “To Die in L.A.,” a captivating and classic refrain-spinning-in-your-head song, springs from a very familiar place. “Well, I was listening to a lot of Madonna,” Hunter says. “ ‘Holiday’—of course. Her Greatest Hits album gets played a lot in our van.” Grief—transformed, uplifted, and made danceable.