In the last five years, members of Grizzly Bear have – among other things –campaigned to defeat Trump, retreated to the wilderness and interned at the world’s best restaurant. Somehow they’ve found time to make a new album

‘I used to have to clean three of these a day,” says Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, pointing to the ox hearts set in front of us. “They’re huge, lots of silver skin and veins. It’s a 45 minute job, very intense.”

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Taylor isn’t talking about some past life working in a butchers or abattoir. The band’s bassist and producer is referring to the past few years, during which he has not only written his own cookbook – 20 Dinners – but taken up apprenticeships at some impressively high-end restaurants: one was Copenhagen’s Noma, which boasts two Michelin stars and has been hailed as the world’s greatest; before that he put in shifts at St John Bread and Wine in London. It was at the latter place – today’s interview venue – that he helped scrub clean the bloodied organs that have since been cut, grilled and served for us with green beans and pickled walnuts.

Such tasks don’t sound like the most relaxing way of spending your between-albums break. But it turns out he’s not the only Grizzly Bear member who has been on a curious sabbatical since they finished touring 2012’s Shields. After four albums of expertly crafted, cerebral, pastoral, indie rock – two of which had made the US Top 10 – they all needed a break. Not just because the writing, touring and promotion had created friction between them – although they admit it inevitably had – but because their lives were all changing dramatically.

Singer Ed Droste had moved to Los Angeles with his husband, only for them to divorce shortly afterwards. “I had to take a year out of everything in order to clear my head and deal with the legal processes,” he says. “Thank God it didn’t happen while we were on tour or making a record.” Drummer Chris Bear moved to Long Island and became a father – a joyous experience, he says, but one that couldn’t help but alter his perspective on the world, “or even the hope that we still have a world”. As for Daniel Rossen, the band’s introspective guitarist and vocalist, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to be involved with music at all: “I was very down on it,” he admits. “My personality is not well suited to the entertainment industry.”

Unsure as to when they would ever make music together again, the band members went their own way for a while. The result is four stories that they happily share, as plates of snails and oak leaf, kohlrabi, and pea and ticklemore gather around us.

Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear performs on stage during Falls Festival in Lorne, Australia. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan/Getty Images

Let’s start with Droste, who was just getting over his divorce when politics “grabbed” him. He had been posting positive things about Bernie Sanders online, and when the Sanders campaign reached out – asking Droste to serve as a stand in – he agreed. For several weeks, he toured the country, speaking in auditoriums or to small gatherings at gay bars. “Seeing the time, energy and passion people were putting into the campaign inspired me,” he says. And to see it all come to nothing? “I cried,” he says. “I really did. I was extremely emotionally invested in it. And I’d seen people who had dedicated not just some time, like me, but their entire lives to it.” Droste shifted his momentum to supporting Hillary Clinton which meant that, in November 2016, he had to cry again. “But then a lot of people did.” What hurt most, he says, was watching the people he befriended on the campaign trail – gay people, Muslims – talk online about the fears and aggression they now face. “America has become toxic,” he says, “and it’s palpable everywhere.”

Rossen, meanwhile, was witnessing a different kind of political divide. Trying to decide if he wanted to continue pursuing music, he moved with his wife to upstate New York, to explore the wilderness, work the land and – as he puts it – “make your own reality … There’s no consumer culture to be found there, there’s not even any internet.” He lived overlooking rolling hills and wrote songs away from the glare of the industry. But it was not a relaxing experience. “It’s a very politically divided area,” he says. “As a city person living up there I definitely represented something troublesome to a lot of people. It’s not exactly a warm environment.”

Still, Rossen says time spent there ultimately helped kickstart the process of making another Grizzly Bear album. This was good news for both Taylor and Bear, who didn’t need as much convincing that music was the vocation for them. Aside from fatherhood, Bear spent his time immersing himself in improvisational jazz, touring as Beach House’s drummer and writing the score for the HBO show High Maintenance. Taylor, meanwhile, says he was itching to get back in the studio with Grizzly Bear. In fact, he seems to be constantly itching to do as much work as humanly possible – throwing himself into “hobby interests” with a zeal that borders on the manic. He claims to have restored his 1971 motorcycle all by himself, and it was this work ethic that assured St John Bread and Wine’s head chef that he would make a good temporary addition to the kitchen.

“We’d eat here all the time,” explains Taylor. “The staff would come to our shows, we’d go for drinks with them afterwards. Eventually they said I was welcome to come and learn here.”

Working in the kitchens wasn’t easy. One day he was asked to clean and prepare 30 quail. “The next morning, when I rode past some ducks on a pond, I found myself thinking about how I would actually cut them apart. I thought ‘This is getting way weird.’”

It was about to get weirder. On a band visit to Noma, Taylor again got talking to the staff and was invited to try out there. Even for a man who uses the word intense in at least every other sentence, Noma was intense.

“I remember cleaning reindeer moss,” he says. “You’d take a piece the size of your fist and then you’d have to remove each particle of dirt with very fine tweezers. It would take 25 minutes if you were quick … longer than 45 minutes and you’d get screamed at. But you could get pretty zoned in on this piece of moss and all the architecture inside.”

What did it taste like?

“A potato chip! After all that crazy work that went into it!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grizzly Bear. Photograph: Tom Hines

You could make the case that Grizzly Bear are quite a Noma-esque band – painstakingly compiling intricate details while somehow ending up with something organic and beautiful. So it seems sensible to ask to what degree they think their wildly divergent stories contributed to their forthcoming new album, Painted Ruins. It’s filled with the band’s trademark interweaving vocals, and features sweeping synths, delicate guitar textures and deft rhythmic exploration, but hardly stands out for its strident political campaign songs or lyrics about poultry dismemberment.

The band agree that their breaks were mainly about recharging brains. Grizzly Bear work as a democracy, with everybody bringing songwriting ideas and multi-instrumental flair to proceedings, but this also takes time and brings its own tensions. “You become family when you’re in a band,” says Rossen. “We love each other and have utmost respect for each other, but sometimes you reach a point where you’re like: ‘I’ve got to go live my own life for a while.’” He points out that previous albums had been made in a “pressure cooker situation, where we’d all cram into a house and barrel into it, which was an exciting way to work but also a bit of a mess”. This time, they made sure they had all their songs sketched out in advance, giving them more time to explore the sonic textures and arrangements.

Ultimately, the quartet believe the political shifts going on in the US played the greatest role in shaping their music – having a child, joining a campaign team or living out in the wilderness merely heightened their sense of urgency to regroup and make a statement.

“There’s a new meaning to mortality nowadays,” says Taylor. “We’re not necessarily going to be around to make five more records. So let’s put everything we can into this one.”