As a songwriter for the biggest names in pop and the frontman of the rock group OneRepublic, Ryan Tedder estimates having sold “hundreds of millions of records,” but his commercial strategy can be counterintuitive. The band’s new album, Oh My My, hits shelves on Friday, and Tedder calls the lead single “Wherever I Go” “a really odd song to lead with”—more skittish and angular than usual. “It doesn’t really sound like us,” he tells Vogue.com. “We just wanted to see what we could get away with.”

It’s a high-risk move with potentially high rewards: “If you’re able to connect with something really different that people don’t expect,” Tedder says, “that’s the best kind of song to have.” OneRepublic has tried this approach before, climbing the pop charts with hits ranging from the soaring power ballad “Apologize” to the stern folk onslaught of “Counting Stars." And Tedder has also shown an aptitude for the unexpected in the songs he has written for others, moving between scorched earth rock (The Fray’s “Love Don’t Die”), classic soul (Adele’s “Rumour Has It”), and plinky ’80s-inflected pop (Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York”).

One listener who fell for a Tedder curveball was the English singer Leona Lewis. “One of the first songs I heard by Ryan was ‘Apologize,’” she recalls via email. “It was so fresh and stood out from everything that was being played at that time.” She subsequently recorded “Bleeding Love,” a Tedder cowrite that approaches the status of a modern standard. “Whether [his] song is a stripped-back ballad or a full-on production piece, the foundation is always strong,” she says. “He understands what it is to be the artist as well as the producer, so he has a great vantage point from which he can craft.”

Tedder likes to stay busy, so he commenced work on Oh My My in 2014 around the time he finished contributing to Adele’s 25 and U2’s Songs of Innocence. “I was like, for the first time ever, I don’t have something on deck,” he remembers. “We need to do another album. We need to get going now.”

Due to the band’s heavy touring schedule, much of the album was recorded in hotel rooms around the world, where the group attempted to cook up songs that would counter the dominance of digital pop. “When you’re in a band, I think it’s even more important that people can tell there are human beings doing the music,” Tedder explains. “It would be one thing for us to do a song with The Chainsmokers or Kygo. It would be another thing to rip off The Chainsmokers and try to sound like them.”