Their studio is really just a basement flat—the same space where Chvrches have recorded nearly all of their music since forming in late 2011. As the trio lead me through a tour, they point out how few elements actually forged the heart-soaring maximalism of their 2013 debut album, The Bones of What You Believe: just three keyboards and a microphone, preserved for posterity. “Someone made the point that our first album is probably one of the very few self-written, self-recorded, self-produced records to make it into the UK Top 10,” says Mayberry. “That was recorded on this thing, y’know?” She hits the mic stand. “That made me feel pretty good.”

The band was craving home comforts when they got back into their digs in January, just six weeks after wrapping up the marathon tour for Bones, which spanned 365 gigs across two years. Chvrches started touring as an unsigned act with a little online buzz 10 months before releasing their universally acclaimed debut, and grinding away on the road helped them secure their future on their own terms. The intense hard work paid off: Bones went gold in the UK and sold 182,000 copies in the States, while the video for “The Mother We Share” has racked up more than 10 million views on YouTube. Their celestial synth-pop crushed together defiance and vulnerability while exuding a welcoming queerness, earning them an unusually rabid fanbase for an indie band.

But the gruelling tour schedule allowed little time to create new music together; while on the road, Doherty took to recording one song or idea every day as a coping mechanism, to make him “at least feel like a musician.” So getting back into their own space to write and record was crucial to Chvrches’ proud sense of themselves as a proper band. Going into album two, they had no concrete plan beyond pushing everything to be “20 percent different, bigger, better,” says Cook.

Having eschewed costly studio fees to work in their own studio at their own speed—only restricted by their upstairs neighbors’ sleeping schedules—they spent their advance on “all the synthesizers I’ve wanted since I knew what synthesizers were,” says Doherty. The walls of one room are flanked by more than a dozen flashing keyboards, including a rare, military-looking Moog that none of them actually know how to work. “There are no live drums,” says Cook. “Keeping it real—or unreal.” Another room houses Mayberry’s vocal booth, a flimsy purple foam thing that looks liable to collapse.

We take seats in the very warm live room, and Cook cues up a few more finished tracks. As with the rest of the album, these songs were mixed by famed studio guru Spike Stent—whose résumé features the likes of U2, Beyoncé, and Björk—and they all sound massive. “Never Ending Circles” is hooked around a bright, repeatedly stumbling synth part and features a middle-eight that evokes the more sparkling moments from Taylor Swift’s 1989. Mayberry describes the R&B-inflected “Leave a Trace” as “the nastiest, snidest tune” on the record: Her voice sounds deeper and more soulful than ever as she sings of a lover who talks “far too much for someone so unkind.” “Make Them Gold”, meanwhile, might be the most anthemic Chvrches song yet, somewhere between Starship and Erasure with its racing drums, gaudy synth dazzle, and message of anxious empowerment: “We are made of our longest days/ We are falling but not alone.”