The goal of the game was to lead the band into putting together the ingredients of great songs without aping them directly. “O.K., the bass line is quarters in the verses and eighth notes in the chorus,” Daniel offered as an example. “The melody stays on the same note as the root chord.” Sometimes someone guessed a title — the bassist Rob Pope recognized Daniel’s choice of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” — and if so, the idea was discarded, because “as soon as somebody knows what the song is, you can no longer get past that.” An hour into considering how to describe his secret song, the keyboard player and guitarist Eric Harvey absently tapped out a pattern on a drum, and Eno immediately said, “Oh, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’?” (In Spoon, pretty much everyone plays multiple instruments.)

Spoon’s new album, “They Want My Soul,” comes out on Aug. 5 and contains only one track spawned from the game, which the band played several times throughout the prerecording process. The song, “Outlier” (standout lyric: “I remember when you walked out of ‘Garden State’ — ‘cause you had taste, you had taste”), was connected to Harvey’s description of “The Glorious Land” by PJ Harvey (no relation). But the game illuminates a defining aspect of Spoon’s music. Spoon seems to look at rock songs analytically and figure out ways to deconstruct them, as a molecular gastronomist might do with a traditional recipe. Riffs and instruments stand out in Spoon’s songs, individual sounds in empty space. The result is that their songs deliver a pure rush of musical elation, the distillation of rock music, in the way that sea-urchin foam on an avant-garde restaurant’s plate provides a diner with the essential flavor of ocean. Spoon delivers the power of familiar songs without actually sounding that much like other rock music at all.

“Maybe I’m too much of a stickler,” Daniel said as we drove to meet the band in June after taping two songs for “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” He’s tall and pale, with a thatch of reddish-blond hair; the serious set of his mouth countermands the jug ears of a Texas farmhand in a Dust Bowl photograph. Mixing the sound after their set, usually a 15-minute process, had taken an hour and a half. In the sound room, Daniel and Eno had coaxed the Kimmel sound engineer to scrub the mix of added effects. “Is there any reverb on that snare?” Daniel asked while listening to “Rent I Pay.” “Not really,” the engineer responded blithely, and the looks of annoyed amusement on Daniel’s and Eno’s faces resembled that of a mother told by a baseball-bat-holding child that he doesn’t know who broke that window.

“This stuff makes a difference,” Daniel said in the car, “even if every TV viewer doesn’t know they’re hearing it.” When I admitted that I, unlike everyone else in the room, couldn’t hear the changes either, he nodded and tried to explain: “TV sound is totally different. They applied all these effects to the sound. It was so watery. . . . It’s got that cheap digital reverb on it. The sound isn’t crisp. We wanted it to be drier. We wanted each sound to stand on its own so that the individual sounds are more discrete.”

Two nights later, “Jimmy Kimmel Live” aired “Rent I Pay,” the first song on their new album. The Buzzfeed music writer Matthew Perpetua tweeted that the song “slays” and added, “I’ve been trying to figure out what classic-rock song it reminds me of but can’t quite place it.”