Walkmen Bring More Than 'Half-Baked' Songs on New Album

After a gig at the Guggenheim Museum last Friday and the final Central Park SummerStage show on Sunday, the Walkmen are staying busy. The New York-based band is currently in a studio preparing tracks for their fifth studio album, due early next spring or summer. Frontman Hamilton Leithauser tells Spinner that this time around, he strived to make the recording process easier by fleshing out songs and possible arrangements in advance with his bandmates.

"We always go in with these like half-baked things," Leithhauser says. "This time we've really done it differently. We tried to put everything together so that we really know what we knew what we wanted to do. There's always something that goes wrong, but I feel a lot more confident in this batch than any other time when we were going in."

For most of their seven-year career, the Walkmen have had a love-hate relationship with the studio. In early 2000, drummer Matt Barrick, guitarist Paul Maroon and bassist/organist Walter Martin established their own studio, Marcata Recording, in Harlem to scale back expenses and nail their piano-driven sound. Outfitted solely with vintage analog equipment, the studio birthed Walkmen's breakout debut, 'Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone' and their two subsequent albums. Still, so burned were the boys on tinkering with arrangements, they brought in engineer Kevin McMahon to do the dirty work.

Since adding McMahon, Leithauser tells Spinner recording has gotten much easier -- "We can go in and just describe what we want and then he'll set up," he says -- but the bristly singer contends that no matter how much is pre-planned, creating an album is still emotionally draining, not to mention expensive. "You think you got something great and it just falls apart so quickly," he says. "And then it starts when you pay those fees and then you realize you're in there with nothing and you got all that money spent on it."

Regardless, Leithauser and Co., who trek to Scandinavia for a performance Sept. 1, are optimistic about the new goods. "This is a long album, and I think we all like all of the songs a lot," he says. "It just seems solid through and through, and we've really combed over all the details to try and make sure everything's good. It seems like it's gonna go smoothly. I hope so."