Pitchfork: The Seduction of Kansas references some beloved American icons, like Superman and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, as well as some truly reprehensible characters. What’s the concept behind the album?

Katie Alice Greer: We are very fascinated with Western and American mythology: Why are these the cultural touchstones that we believe in? Why are these the stories that we pass on? What are the values and pride in this? What are the ways that we are viewing ourselves? The record turned into a larger meditation on perception and interpretation of how things happened, rather than trying to objectively say, “This is how it happened.”

G.L. Jaguar: A lot of the songs were written around a time when we were doing pretty extensive touring around the middle of the country, seeing the vast expanses of America and the different climate that we are in today. We all watched the David Byrne movie True Stories and a lot of Americana things like that. We got pretty into “Westworld” for a minute.

How has touring throughout the world over the last few years shaped your view of America?

KAG: It sounds corny but I love it so much more now. It’s so beautiful. It’s really fulfilling to see that you could be in Boise or El Paso, and there’s still people who are happy to be experiencing live music. It has also given me more perspective on why people have different ideas about things.

Daniele Daniele: There are so many radically different ways to live and get by that I would have never been exposed to had I not been on tour. Like, how do you start a show space? How do you start a band? How do you start a record label? The feats of ingenuity and perseverance—and the idea of success and failure—all become less black-and-white at some point.

GLJ: One thing that’s really missing from a lot of people’s lives is perspective. It’s really great striking up conversations with people all over, because there are so many similarities. The vast scale of this country is so mind blowing, and there are so many people. But at the end of the day, a lot of them have the same wants, needs, desires, dreams, and goals, just with contextual differences.

Some of the songs on the album come from the perspective of unseemly people—like the egotistical narrator of “Jesus’ Son” and the vindictive murderess of “I’m Clean.” What are your personal feelings about these kinds of characters?

DD: For me, it wasn’t judgment, it was almost the opposite. Because once you mark something as verboten, it goes in this dark realm where it’s locked in a box—and then I just want to take a flashlight and be like, “What’s it like in a dark box?” Rather than calling certain feelings of holding power bad, I wanted to explore the pleasure in being mean to somebody in a power play. There is a lot of pleasure in power dynamics, but because we are so busy condemning them we forget that there’s actually a reason they keep coming up.

KAG: The most reprehensible character I wrote on the album is the narrator in “Control Freak.” One of my favorite lyrics from the record is in that song: “I feel misunderstood, like I’m some kind of enemy/When I’m the one in charge of all the things that make you happy.” I definitely have felt that in the band before. We were going through periods of not getting along while writing this record, so on some level, writing some of these characters was me working through that.