Since 2020, Brooklyn-based synth-pop band Nation of Language has been near ubiquitous, releasing a fresh record every year and a half or so and crisscrossing the country in between. Their fourth album, “Dance Called Memory,” released this past September, is the band’s most expansive, refracting their usual influences — Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Rational Youth, Kraftwerk — through a darker lens. The songs still ache and swoon, moving hearts and hips alike, but they’re imbued with a more profound sense of grief, as frontman Ian Devaney reckoned with the death of loved ones and the dissolution of friendships.

“A lot of the songs evoke a desolate vista to me,” says Devaney, speaking to Style Weekly on a Zoom call from the band’s tour bus. “One of the big influences on this record was the band Mojave 3. Their record, ‘Ask Me Tomorrow,’ lives in this open Western wasteland, so letting some lonesome Western vibes bleed into this record was a goal — it opens with a harmonica.”

Despite that heaviness, Devaney, synthesist Aiden Noell (to whom Devaney is married), and bassist Alex MacKay, display keen pop instincts throughout the album, skills they’ve sharpened significantly as venue capacities and critical acclaim have grown. Each track on “Dance Called Memory” is enormous, packed to the rafters with deft production tics, driving rhythms, and irresistible melodies. Songs like “In Another Life” and “In Your Head” feel urgent and propulsive, while “I’m Not Ready For The Change” and “Inept Apollo” offer a sweeping, intoxicating swirl.

The band plays The Broadberry on Monday, Oct. 27, with an opening set from Chicago’s Deeper.

Style Weekly: All of your records deal with huge, sometimes existential emotions. In listening to all four, I noticed that much of what happens in these songs takes place in transit or through movement. How does transit or motion work for you as a processing tool?

Ian Devaney: When I was writing songs before the pandemic, a lot came from how your time to think and process is when you’re on the subway every morning doing your commute. You’re constantly on the move, surrounded by people, but you’re also pretty isolated. Now, in a “post-pandemic” world, I’m on tour so much that, once again, any sort of processing of life things is done out on the road. This most recent record was written during a very low mental health time, and a lot of that was happening through — and being processed during — touring and travel. In getting home, it felt like there was an increased pressure bearing down on me. But I had my guitars and recording set up, and I could try to do something about it.

There seems to be a dichotomy in “Dance Called Memory” between wanting to feel these feelings and get through them, and wanting to avoid them altogether. The opening song is called “Can’t Face Another One,” but the chorus is, “I don’t want to break my fall.” How much is this record about avoidance versus confrontation?

That tension is inherent in suffering, I think. Whenever people go through a period of grief or intense change, there can be so many contradictory ideas: wanting to be alone, wanting to be around other people so that you can escape your thoughts. Maybe that’s part of what makes it so challenging; it’s difficult to figure out how you should feel or where you should be standing. There can be such whiplash, especially if you are contending with guilt or shame around your suffering. That song title and chorus really do sum a lot of it up. You’re waking up like, “Jesus Christ, this again?” but at the same time thinking, “This is what I deserve.”

I’m 35 now, and started writing most of these songs when I was 33 or 34. Once you get into your thirties, you might imagine that you’ve experienced most of your lowest lows. Then, there’s this shock and reminder that that’s not always the case. It makes me think of the post-Soviet Union, End of History theory that liberal democracy was just going to carry on forever, and everything was going to be fine. I feel like I had settled into some version of that for my mental health — I figured I was good. [Laughs] But then I was broadsided, and had to contend with the fact that I needed some help — a therapist, maybe medication. I thought I had been cruising in one direction, but things had changed.

I was going to ask if you were nervous — sometimes artists are afraid that antidepressants will numb their creativity — but it sounds like you were pretty open to it.

I had never taken any antidepressants or anything, but probably about midway through the writing of this record, I was like, “I definitely need to try that.” [Laughs] Thankfully, I had a lot of people around me who were like, “Ask me anything about this.” Some people have been on them for years; some told me they did it for a year or two, and tapered off in consultation with their doctor. The fact that you can jump in knowing that it’s not necessarily forever is a comforting thought. And there wasn’t any question about this affecting my creativity. So be it. Who cares? I went in without any reservations.

Did you feel that you were able to access, or maybe more fully give words to, the feelings you were feeling once you started taking antidepressants?

Yeah, the access felt a little different. I could still find words, but beforehand, it felt like you were in a cage, screaming out. And afterward, that cage is still open.  You can still look or step inside, but it doesn’t feel like the door is locked.

That reminds me of a short comic about grief where there’s a container with a metal ball inside. The metal ball is grief, and you are the container. The metal ball stays the same size, but the container can grow and expand, or shrink and become narrower, but the grief always stays the same size. I hear that in the record. It’s probably the darkest Nation of Language record, but there’s a lot of hope and resilience buried in there.

I do feel like I imbued a lot of these songs with some kind of hope, even though I was trying to tell myself not to. I wanted it to be a complex listening experience. While we were recording it, we talked about how Radiohead’s “Kid A” is not a happy record, but it’s fun to listen to. I think about, for example, the choice of the last song, “Nights of Weight.” All of our other records kind of end with this roll-the-credits exhalation, which is always a temptation for me, but instead, I wanted to have the last note of this record end in suspension. In my mind, it’s not a satisfying “everything’s going to be okay” sort of moment.

When you sing “Sure of what I was” in the bridge of “I’m Not Ready for the Change,” a loop of your voice hovers in the background. There are a lot of these little moments across the record where voices flicker around like ghosts haunting corners. How much of those were conscious production choices versus happy accidents in the studio?

It was a bit of a combination. I have been having a lot of fun using the sampled voice as an instrument, like the vocal bits at the end of “Silhouette.” I don’t know what has been drawing me to using the voice that way — maybe it’s from having grown up in choirs in church, and in school, and wanting to access something from that. It imbues a certain humanity, but a facsimile of humanity, because you can tell that it’s reversed or sampled. Maybe there’s something relatable in a strange, twisted way about hearing the human voice messed with like that.

It’s kind of funny — the chorus on “Can’t Face Another One” uses sampler choir sounds, which are a direct influence from the “Titanic” soundtrack. It’s a very strange soundtrack in terms of production, filled with that ’90s choir-sounding synth patch. At some point, I was trying to figure out one of the songs from “Titanic,” but instead ended up writing “Can’t Face Another One.”

Guitar has crept in slowly over the course of your discography, but this one seems to foreground it in a bigger way. What was it about these songs that you felt needed a bigger embrace of guitar sounds?

A lot of it wasn’t even intentional, necessarily. When you’re depressed, doing something with your hands, whether it’s playing guitar, knitting, or any sort of tactile art form, is a really good way to step outside of the regular loops of your brain for a second. I was sitting around the house playing guitar a lot, and because I knew that that was something that I could turn to. These songs started to fall out simply through having it in my hands all the time. “Can You Reach Me,” specifically, is one where I was just aimlessly strumming the guitar. I had strung it differently and was finding a lot of satisfaction in playing an instrument I knew, but sounded and felt different. That Song and “Nights of Weight” both just appeared. It’s probably why they’re mostly the same chords as each other. [Laughs]

“Can You Reach Me?” struck me the most when first listening to the album. It feels like a classic ’70s California rock song nestled amongst goth, shoegaze, and Cocteau Twins-style dream pop. You’ve mentioned Mojave 3, “Kid A,” and the Titanic soundtrack, but what else were you turning to for inspiration?

When you list those three albums in succession, I’m like, “I’m an insane person.” [Laughs] I was talking about this with our bassist Alex the other day, and he was likening it to a lost Fleetwood Mac song. I didn’t grow up listening to Fleetwood Mac, so I think this is more of the Bruce Springsteen fandom of my youth coming through. That song definitely occupies its own space for me. There are some unusual things about it, like the way it transitions to the bridge — I shocked myself as I played it. And yeah, I almost can’t account for it, because it definitely lies outside of a lot of the typical influences. There is a touch of Mojave 3, but my best guess is that it was from the Boss.

We’ve talked about the tension that’s in these songs, and that one especially sticks out, because you cloak overt mentions of heartache, like the lyrics “Catatonic on the seven train/Stuck, living in symphonic pain,” in these bright, sunlit harmonies and chiming guitar. As pained and doleful as some of these songs can be, there’s still so much kinetic energy. What do you find appealing about that juxtaposition? 

There was a study that came out — I saw it after we were done making the record — about the best cures for depression. It had SSRIs, therapy, exercise, and all these usual things. But they found that a combination of SSRIs and dance far and away had the best results for the people that they studied. With our first record, “Introduction, Presence,” when we came out of lockdowns, talked to people about it, and finally went on tour, people would tell us stories about how the record served this dual purpose for them. They can sit and be bummed to it, but they can also dance around their living room and escape the confines of their house or mind. I think I’ve internalized that dichotomy. Robyn’s song “Dancing On My Own” is a great example: You’re feeling the sad feelings even more while also getting relief from them.

How much did these songs change between the initial demoing and when you were in the studio with producer Nick Millhiser?

The bones of a lot of them ended up pretty similar, but, for example, “In Your Head” is a song that definitely blossomed even more once Nick got his hands on it. All of the guitar work in that song was him suggesting, “I think it would sound fucking sick if you just repeated one note.” We ended up restructuring the song around highlighting that guitar idea.

“In Another Life” is a song where, when I demoed it, it was just my voice, guitar, and bass. That song is now a very different thing, but it still has its core emotion. We had this Moog percussion synthesizer called the DFAM, and we wanted to experiment with running all of the percussion through another synth, the Korg MS-20. It squeezes everything into this strange little box that you can then modulate in real time.  We really tried to step outside of our usual recording processes, because we wanted to have fun even while recording depressing songs. [Laughs]

“There’s that proverb that says, ‘A man never sets foot in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.’ That’s sort of how it feels going out to play the songs each night … Suddenly, the light on the song has shifted.”

 

In performing these new songs, have you discovered anything new about the older songs? 

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been thinking about how your relationship to old songs changes. Rather than getting tired of them, you can discover new things the more you play them. I came across this clip just the other day of the singer of Future Islands saying essentially the same thing. He’s talking about this song that’s been in their set for 15 years, and how it’s been the most fascinating journey for him. He’s still discovering new things about himself, and playing this song is an interesting way of tracking personal and emotional growth through his life. That’s something that has been top of mind as we’re embarking on this super long tour.

There’s that proverb that says, “A man never sets foot in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” That’s sort of how it feels going out to play the songs each night. You really never know when some line that you hadn’t even thought about before is suddenly incredibly profound because of whatever you’ve been going through recently. Suddenly, the light on the song has shifted.

A song is never really finished; it’s just captured.

Yes, exactly. We did a tour with Beach Fossils last year, and they recently put out a short album of their songs reimagined. They worked with an arranger and made these late-night, piano lounge versions. It totally recontextualizes them. So often when you finish your record, you’re like, “And now the song is done.” No! If you want it to be, this is just the beginning.

Nation of Language and Deeper perform at The Broadberry on Monday, Oct. 27. Tickets were moving fast, according to organizers, so anyone interested may not want to wait for the doors, which open at 7 p.m.