The Walkmen Perform Live on the Interface

Even though the Walkmen's new album is named 'Lisbon,' most of the record took shape in a very different city: Dallas, Texas.

"When we left New York and went to Dallas for the first time, which was just this test run, we were doing this day of recording and nobody had any expectations," frontman Hamilton Leithauser told Spinner during a recent Interface taping in our L.A. studio. "We redid three songs or something like that."

So, what was it about Dallas that changed the record? "We had been doing [songs] in New York and they were fine, but there was just nothing that was really grabbing us about any of them," Leithauser said. "It was very quick and cheap and talking about the cheapness, we liked [it] a lot. But it really was a lot more fun and so we went back down to Dallas and we did the rest of the record there in that sort of same style. It's just a very different animal. It's much [more] raw and sort of just bashing it out in this concrete room."

Still, the city of Lisbon earned the album title. "We went to Lisbon two times during the period where we were writing the record and we had a very nice time there," bassist Peter Bauer recalled. "The quality of however we all related to the city was similar to how we related to the vibe of the music we were making."

"It was just this place that we'd gone twice and had these really great times while we were in the throes of writing the whole thing," Leithauser added. "These are like landmarks for the band over that period, I guess. It's the most interesting thing we did while we wrote the record."

In that vein, the band already has some travel plans for their next record. "Our next record is gonna be called Maui, so we can go there," Bauer joked.