Whenever they perform, Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, the members of Wye Oak, walk a tightrope.
Wye Oak shows are tightly scripted, out of necessity, but never robotic. Stack plays complex drum patterns and synths simultaneously, managing loops he triggers at the beginnings of songs. Wasner switches from guitar to keyboards to bass, steps on various effects pedals, and sings. Her voice is often doubled (by a machine) an octave below or above. She’s one of the most versatile indie-rock musicians you’ll find anywhere.
“Andy and I are both crazy perfectionists,” Wasner says. “When we’re practicing our live shows, we’re not just practicing the songs. We’re practicing the transitions. … There’s so much that each of us is responsible for.”
“Tween,” a collection of songs surprise-released June 9, is a transitional album, bridging Wye Oak’s distant and recent past, while also closing the band’s current chapter. Wye Oak performs at the Ballroom at the Outer Space in Hamden on Thursday, June 16, with TEEN opening.
The 10 songs on “Tween” were recorded during sessions from Wye Oak’s last two albums: the guitar-heavy “Civilian” from 2011, and 2014’s “Shriek,” which essentially had no guitar on it at all.
Much of what you hear — relaxed ’80s synth-pop; odd meters and complex polyrhythms; electronic glitches and bleeps; lush washes of sound and processed vocal textures; loud-soft contrasts; distorted rock and strummed-folk guitars — aligns with either “Civilian” or “Shriek,” depending on which album you’ve been listening to lately.
Wasner and Stack formed Wye Oak in Baltimore in the mid-aughts. Stack handled drums and lower-frequency stuff, leaving the upper registers to Wasner’s guitar and keyboards, on the band’s first three albums: the self-released “If Children” from 2007; “The Knot” from 2009, produced by Wasner and Stack; and “Civilian,” often hailed as the band’s breakthrough.
That setup was flipped for “Shriek”: Wasner picked up the bass, and Stack added top-line parts with his free hand. The experiment worked; “Before,” the opening track of “Shriek,” finds Wasner singing and repeating a bass figure, while Stack adds the harmonic material. Wasner throws some Chris Squire-like fuzz-bass into “The Tower,” adding new colors and tracing lines back to complex instrumental rock of the mid-’70s.
Inverting registers, Wasner says, allowed them to approach songs from new directions.
“Now, when I sit down to write a song, I can write on piano, or I can play the bass and write a song around that,” she says. “I can play guitar. The point was never to eliminate [the guitar] entirely from our aesthetic and our choice of sounds. It was to give us more options to work with in the long run.”
The lack of guitar on “Shriek” didn’t go unnoticed by critics and fans. “The narrative got away from us a little bit,” Wasner says. “The purpose was not to deny ourselves a tool. The purpose was to expand the palette of the tools that we were allowed to work with.”
On “Tween,” Wasner and Stack treat transitions — intros, outros, bridges, the in-between spaces — as places to experiment. Interstitial spaces, expanded through changes in dynamics and new melodies, turn three-minute indie-pop songs into inventive, proggy space-rock jams.
“Too Right,” a standout, falls into a weirdly sycopated 4/4 pattern. Tribal drums fall around electric and acoustic guitars and droning feedback. Two verses and choruses pass; Stack’s drums dissolve at the bridge. A new, ecstatic stop-time figure enters, along with more electronic sounds, as the register expands in both directions.
“Now that we are in a space where we’re able to incorporate all of the tools at our disposal, it’s more about, ‘What would be the most interesting thing to do in this section? What would be the most unexpected thing to do in this section?'” Wasner says. “With ‘Too Right,’ I do think it would have been very easy to take that as a very straightforward guitar-rock direction. It’s fun to get some fun, polyrhythmic, Krautrock-y synth action going on in there underneath.”
“On Luxury,” a carefully layered synth-pop song with a slow-swaying groove and another exploratory bridge, started life as Stack instrumental.
“I actually added my parts to his pre-existing template,” Wasner says. “That was actually very fun for me, because that’s not something we do very often with this band. Often, I’ll hack together the skeleton of a song, and then I’ll send it to him to expand upon, and we’ll go from there.”
Wasner and Stack self-produced. (Hugo Nicholson helped with mixing.) Over the years, they’ve grown as producers, engineers and arrangers.
“We’re lucky enough to have our recording setups already there in our respective homes,” Wasner says. “We’ve both gotten a lot better at what we do. It used to be that it was a lot more challenging to bring ideas that we had to life, and now we’re just kind of having this arsenal of tricks at our disposal.”
Wye Oak’s upcoming tour kicks off in Hamden and extends through mid-August.
Wasner’s solo project, Flock of Dimes, will release its debut album before the end of the year. Flock of Dimes, Wasner says, is the missing piece of the puzzle.
“It’s important to me that people don’t see it as wanting to move away from Wye Oak,” Wasner says. “Both of them are equally important. If I only have one thing, then that one thing is going to be the recipient of all of my resentment over how slow-moving the entire process is. I hope that, in the future, if I’m able to juggle them both, I’ll stay motivated and fresh and inspired about both of them. So far, in the beginning stages of this process, it seems to be working.”
WYE OAK performs at the Ballroom at the Outer Space in Hamden on Thursday, June 16, at 9 p.m., with TEEN opening. $15. manicproductions.org.
