So with the band as a collective unit, what did you create musically?
With the songs being more directed at a personal more angst feel, I think things are definitely heavier. Everybody says this is their heaviest and most melodic but it truly is for us. The feeling was, let’s really do something aggressive. We felt that way as a reaction from our own work. When we made ‘Wretched and Divine’ and as much as I love it, it’s a pretty sparkly record—it’s a record that could be done as a play because it’s very theatrical with no grit. Like many artists, we don’t want to redo what we did. We’re savvier musicians than we were five or six years ago. We were writing songs together as opposed to fragmented in the studio. So we really wrote songs together, making decisions collectively with Bob there, and went back to a much more grittier and heavier sound.