From left: Joseph D’Agostino, Brian Hamilton, Matt Whipple, Andrew Dole. Photos by Eric White.

Cymbals Eat Guitars: "Chambers" (via SoundCloud)

Last December, Cymbals Eat Guitars played a basement show in New Brunswick, New Jersey, about an hour north of where singer Joseph D’Agostino grew up along the Jersey Shore. And as the band watched 120 kids take in their repertoire of gnarled, mid-tempo guitar exercises, they started wondering what would happen if they made a song that actually fit that context—something written from a pop perspective and aimed at getting sweaty bodies moving.

They came up with “XR”, a harmonica-driven pub crawl of old memories that visits local record stores, still-active Myspace pages for dead friends, and subterranean Wrens shows—the kind of rambunctious sing-along that might inspire kids like them, Jersey boys raised on alcohol and self-reflection, to daydream about becoming an important band. It’s the thematic centerpiece of their third album, LOSE, which arrives three full years after 2011’s Lenses Alien, a lineup change—founding drummer Matthew Miller was replaced by Andrew Dole—and a new understanding of how they want to make music.

It sounds like such an obvious idea—writing songs that rock and bop!—but it works to make LOSE, which was produced by long-time collaborator John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Dinosaur Jr.) both accessible and complex, filled with starry guitar epics, piano-driven ballads, and hoarsely shouted hooks aimed in the right direction.

D’Agostino’s lyrics also began to explicitly acknowledge a formative personal event: the death of Benjamin High, a close friend who passed away as the band was initially building steam. “It was bubbling below the surface for much of the first two records, but I was being oblique,” the 25-year-old says. “But with this record I wanted to simplify and say something that was truthful to me—and I feel like, as an artist, I’m ready to do the subject matter justice.”

The frontman also tapped further into the mythology of New Jersey, peppering his lyrics with regional references to color his personal anguish into a bigger picture. Sprawling album opener “Jackson” ends with D’Agostino howling about not wanting to lose his life to a mythical evil, while “Child Bride” is about a childhood friend who wastes his potential due to a broken home. When D’Agostino tells me about some of these more direct, real-life inspirations, he averts his gaze and twirls his curly hair around a finger like someone half his age. It’s still a new approach for him. Luckily, though, that tentativeness is nowhere to be found on LOSE, which crashes through with an unrelenting widescreen confidence.

Pitchfork: With this album, you wanted to play something less complicated than the first two records. What was that born out of?

Joseph D’Agostino: "Warning" was the first song that was written for the record, about two-and-a-half years ago, and we just wanted to see if we could write something with a big chorus that didn't feel forced or dumb.

Matt Whipple: We had a really hard time with "Warning" and we went through multiple versions of the song before we felt confident with it.

JD: We tried to make it sound like Roxy Music at one point, which was a disaster.

MW: "Let's put saxophones on it!" Finally, we just had to come to terms with what it was.

JD: We were very insecure about having a song with that straightforward verse-chorus-verse thing, but, as it turned out, we were just being pussies. It's one of my favorites now.

Pitchfork: What's the story behind all the Jersey mythology on the record?

JD: I live on Staten Island, but I grew up in South Jersey, in Waretown, so I’m a Jersey boy through and through. We all are, actually, except for Andrew. All that Jersey folklore fascinated me in different ways. I use it for larger emotional points, in the Jersey tradition of songwriting [laughs]—like making New Jersey seem like a mystical, magical place.

Pitchfork: “Jackson” alludes to an urban legend of outlaw Native Americans.

JD: Yeah, the Ramapough Indians were a purported clan of misfits and albinos who lived near Jackson, New Jersey, which is close to where I’m from, and that reference is going for this non-specific presence in the woods as you’re driving through at dusk.

MW: We came to learn that the term “Jackson Whites” is actually really offensive, and we were conflicted about whether we were going to change the song.

JD: But we felt it was obvious that it’s not a hateful thing. And the song is like a combined mythology, because I also read this urban legend about an accident on the side of the road where the victims were laying on the pavement—and as people drove past and looked in the rear-view mirror, the people stood up. So I was thinking about having to drive through the woods in Jersey at night, which is what I spent a lot of my teenage years doing.

Pitchfork: As people who grew up close to New York City, do you feel any connection to the mythology that comes with being a New York band?

JD: When we were first starting to put this band together, rehearsing in Manhattan and all these different spaces, there was something mystical about that. In 2009, a lot of Brooklyn rock bands were happening, and it was an exciting time to feel like you were a part of something. But I don’t really feel like we were stylistically ever in line with anything that was coming out of Brooklyn. It’s always been an outsider thing for us. So we don’t really feel involved with New York. I like the Jersey myth better than the New York myth, personally. The Wrens are like my favorite band ever.

Brian Hamilton: I was raised on Talking Heads and Lou Reed and all that cool New York stuff, but you can’t try to be that. You have to be yourself. That’s how those people did it.

Pitchfork: The song “Child Bride” seems to be written to a single person. Is it directly autobiographical?

JD: Yeah. My best friend in middle school came from an abusive household—there’s a line about how “your mom slapped the living shit out of you,” and that actually happened one day when I was over his house. Shortly after that, I went to ask him to come outside, and the house was empty. That crazy, surreal thing stuck with me. Much later on, when I was 20, we were on tour and he came out to a show looking not-so-good. It took a while to sink in how sad that was to me, because he was a smart kid who was kept down by circumstances.

Pitchfork: That song in particular addresses this feeling of wasting your youth. Do you worry about that yourself?

JD: Yeah. It’s about him. It’s about me. That’s a universal thing. But I am feeling it now that I’m 25, which sounds silly, but you start to feel your age. That was written when I was spending a lot of time stoned much of the day, and I was thinking about different things that may have gotten by me while I was like that.

MW: Joe is the only member of the band who is still in his 20s and he's still super worried about losing them. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Thinking towards the future, do you see it being three more years until your next record comes out?

JD: I hope not. I don’t think there’s a luxury of waiting that long anymore. We went through a lot over the past three years, and spent time stuck in the muck and the mire of regular life, trying to hack it, making it work being in a band. I’m hoping that this record will make a leap. We hoped that Lenses would, but that seems a little funny in retrospect. That record is so psychedelic and knotty and crazy—we could have wrote three really cracking songs, really good singles. But instead we just put it all together, smoking a lot of dope at the time.

BH: We’re more clear-eyed now.