With the release of their sophomore album, Los Angeles four-piece Silversun Pickups seem assured of rising to the next level. The band’s new release, Swoon, is a much more accomplished effort than their debut, Carnavas, with more rounded textures and a greater sense of its own surety. Where the debut felt very much indebted to heroes such as Smashing Pumpkins, Swoon has significantly more its own style.

“This is our first full cycle,” explains drummer Chris Guanlao, alluding to the record-tour-write-record-tour-write format that seems to engulf so many bands. “We were really fortunate with Carnavas to be on the road for a while; we toured on that record for about two years. But at the same time when we came back home we were different people, and our surroundings that were once so familiar were really kinda bizarre-looking.”

When it came time to write for their second album, Silversun Pickups thus found themselves in a strange position – they were returning to what they knew when they wrote Carnavas, but so much time has passed and so much had changed since then. “It was a little melancholy, but very focussed,” he says, “and a lot of question marks as to what we were going to do – this is the first time we’d ever actually written an album to record.

“During Carnavas,” he continues, “we’d known those songs for a long time and played a lot of those songs live for a few years. It’s that whole thing: you have a lifetime to write your first album, and then a year to write your second.”

The sound of Swoon is much more varied than on the band’s debut – there are more ups and downs, greater ebbs and flows. “We were going through a lot of emotions, and were at this point in our lives where we were really confused as to who we were,” Chris admits. “That definitely added to it. We made a conscious effort to change things up – we didn’t want to write a record that was just straightforward, and we wanted to add more moodiness into it.

“It starts off really strong,” he elaborates of Swoon, “and then it just mellows out and takes you under a little bit in the middle, and there’s definitely that sense of moodiness, of a mental breakdown that’s consciously there, and we did that on purpose, as it mimicked what we were going through.”

In many ways, Swoon is the logical progress point for the band. Where Carnavas set the Los Angeles-based four-piece a starting point, Swoon finds them not just stretching their sound but also aiming for the stars. There’s big choruses to be found on the likes of single Panic Switch, the sort of hooks that are seemingly tailor-made for commercial radio acceptance. It doesn’t seem like Silversun Pickups will be sated by playing the same venues that they performed in on the back of Carnavas – instead, they’re aiming to become a stadium rock act.

“Our natural progression is to take it to another level,” he states confidently. “We didn’t want to just put out something that was similar to Carnavas. On Carnavas we took out a lot of organic sounds, like acoustic guitars and strings, and on this record we made a conscious effort to put it back in, because we wanted to get it feeling more organic, and have a different mood to it.

“We grew as musicians,” he continues. “We’re a little more patient with our music, with the songs, and we weren’t so locked into a groove – we experimented a lot with different beats, different styles.”

One of the reasons why the band was able to do this was because Swoon was recorded in their own studio. That allowed them the time and space to really experiment with the songs, and stretch the boundaries of what Silversun Pickups do.

“No one bothered us for six months,” Chris says, explaining that there were no deadlines upon the band to come up with a finished product. “We just went in and it became like a 9 to 5 job…well, not 9 to 5, but 12 noon til 7. Every day we’d work on stuff and really try to be productive, and do different things. In those six months alone we became better musicians.

“We’ve always been really good with each other [in the band]. I thought we complement each other and we can read each other’s minds about what we want to do.”

Understandably, the band went somewhat stir-crazy locked away for that amount of time.

“It was also weird,” he says, “because we came back from touring for two years and were social retards. We didn’t know how to communicate well with other people…at least that’s what it felt like. We’d just go in and play this music and put it all there, and that would work it out in the practice space. At the end of the day I think what we did was really cool, but it’s a hard thing to realise that for the next six months this is what you’re going to do, and it was hard work, but I’m really proud of what came out of it.”

Silversun Pickups’ Swoon is out now through Warner Music.