For the Berklee-bred trio, whose three-years-in-the-works debut “ Florida Guilt ” arrived Tuesday (they support it with a sold-out Cambridge show at the Lilypad Saturday ), constantly renegotiating the parameters of their sound has been the only way forward since releasing a self-titled EP that made them one of the Boston music scene’s premier punk acts — but precipitated an identity crisis.

One day, Bay Faction might record a country album. Or maybe they’ll put out a hard-edged rock concept record. They haven’t decided yet.

“You can play for yourself and what you want to hear, or you can play for somebody else,” says lead vocalist-guitarist James McDermott, who admits the band’s biggest hits — emo toe-tappers “Bloody Nose” and “Jasper Wildlife Assoc.” — began to feel like clothes he’d outgrown by the time Bay Faction’s members were facing graduation.


Last year, McDermott and bassist Kris Roman moved to Brooklyn, while drummer-producer Alex Agresti returned to the suburbs of New Jersey; as they tend to, such major transitions changed everything, including the band’s artistic priorities. They’ve temporarily reconvened in Boston this fall while plotting a more permanent relocation to New Jersey, another huge step for the band. The week before “Florida Guilt” was due to drop, the band members sat down for an interview in a South End coffee shop.

“You finally have enough of yourself to understand what you inherently want and need,” says McDermott, now 23, of living in New York. “I was 19 when the EP was released; I’m in a different headspace now.”

Early tracks like tense “Sasquatch .22” (sample lyric: “I started catching feelings for the girl I’m currently having sex with/ So it’s safe to say we don’t talk anymore”) may have resonated back then, but as McDermott navigated post-grad, he found himself consumed by a more existential struggle: the one between his queer identity and Catholic upbringing.


“Being raised with this real notion of hell, that certain actions get you there, led me to this sense of, ‘OK, I can only have these feelings as long as I do X, Y, and Z,’” says the singer. “For every action, there was some immediate purge that was deserved; being open about it with my family wasn't even an option.”

Agresti and Roman watched as their bandmate and friend channeled inner turmoil into the most urgent lyrics he’d ever written. “It made me happy to see him get that out,” recalls Agresti, 23.

Cathartic lead single “It’s Perfect” leans hard into the self-annihilation of a covert hookup; the more saturnine “Soppping” (spelling theirs) finds McDermott wondering “how to keep a man” without accepting he’s allowed to want one.

At 22 minutes, the album’s a loaded listen. Florida proved a central metaphor, its reputation as a haven for the elderly and intolerant reflecting the same mortal and moral decay McDermott associated with his religious background. To sonically match the material’s heft, the trio knew they had little choice but to burn down the stormy, pop-punk aesthetic with which they’d previously earned enough fans to stage an East Coast tour. From its ashes emerged a more restrained, meticulous sound, awash in synths and grooving guitars.

“There isn’t any note, any section, we haven’t each thought about,” says Agresti, who says going online to work with his bandmates from across state lines, a style he calls the “save-as” approach, was liberating.


Agrees McDermott: “We could focus on building up instead of out . . . not having a 4½-minute song but shoving so much into 1:30 that you have to sit with it.”

Roman suggests that crafting “Florida Guilt” in cyberspace let everyone relax; no one felt the band was wasting money on expensive studio sessions like those they'd attempted after the EP, only to throw out the resulting tapes because they didn’t sound quite right.

In piloting Bay Faction’s new direction, everyone accepted they’d be alienating some fans along the way. “We said, ‘If we release the music we’ve been recording, we have to be prepared to lose half the people who listened to us,’” says McDermott.

But keeping their old sound was never an option, so much so they scrubbed much of their back catalog from streaming platforms. Roman stresses, “We had to follow naturally what we wanted to be doing.” Otherwise, there was no point.

Asked to pinpoint how Bay Faction sounds today, no one gives a straight answer, though soft-rock and pop are both tossed out. For his part, McDermott shrugs. “There’s something beautiful about just letting it be itself,” he says.

Isaac Feldberg can be reached at isaac.feldberg@globe.com, or on Twitter at @isaacfeldberg.