Historic levels of frustration swept the U.S. last October, as the federal government shutdown put the nation on pause. It was then, in Hoboken, New Jersey, that Cloud Nothings were holed up in the no-frills Water Music studio, honing their own brand of pummeling catharsis. The studio is scattered with art and books that look plucked from a thrift store; the band jokes that it feels haunted. They are not far off. A year prior, Water Music came face-to-face with potential defeat when it flooded during Hurricane Sandy, giving its name an eerie edge. And after the recent shuttering of legendary indie club Maxwell's, Hoboken itself seems like a musical ghost town, its tree-lined streets filled with strollers and businessmen and Starbucks. The trying conditions all befit this Cleveland band, which has spent the last few years staring down nostalgia, expectation, and the noise of daily life, and then unleashing a palpable inner-turmoil through guitars and drums and throats. Cloud Nothings always sound like they are fighting, even if it is not exactly clear what they are fighting against.

Frontman Dylan Baldi, 22, bassist TJ Duke, 31, and drummer Jayson Gerycz, 27, are working a final eight-hour day to finish their fourth album, Here and Nowhere Else. Cloud Nothings are all endearing smart-asses; they've spent a portion of their studio time dialing prank calls to Ken Tamplin, a vocal coach who advertises "the world's best singing lessons." Studio talk ranges from Metallica's recent film Through the Never—"What did Kirk's hair plugs look like in 3D?"—to the possibility of heading to rebel rapper Danny Brown's show that night. (Baldi and Brown once toyed with the idea of making a record together.)

For the moment, though, Baldi sits quietly, as usual, hidden under a black Pierced Arrows hoodie while alternately scribbling last-minute lyrics or glancing down at The New Yorker. "I've ignored almost everyone for a whole week," he says, proudly. "It feels good."

The bored-looking singer is recording vocals for what will become the gloomy track "Giving Into Seeing". He scratches his head and ruffles his hair for the duration of his honestly-frightening scream session, repeatedly growling the word "SWALLOW" over an anxiety-laced riff. The song could have come from the band's 2012 Steve Albini-helmed Attack on Memory, the record that found Baldi rejecting his past as a lo-fi bedroom-pop prodigy for a visceral rebirth, morphing Cloud Nothings into an abrasive full-band effort that evokes early emo along with the introspective doom of the Wipers. He reads his lyrics from a sheet of graph paper; the words are written straight and neat.

"Can you sing it wilder?" producer John Congleton asks from the control room. "Make your voice not sound like a voice."

In January, Cloud Nothings are at the slick Brooklyn venue Baby's All Right to perform the entirety of Here and Nowhere Else—a total grayscale sonic assault with some of their most thoroughly anthemic moments—on a stage backed by the glow of inset gemlike lights.

"I don't understand New York," Baldi says that morning, at a nearby cafe. "Big cities confuse me." He prefers a place that is calm, less expensive. The frontman recently moved into the first Cleveland apartment of his own. "The landlords are freaked out," he says, "because I don't really do anything and I leave late and come back late, and my apartment always smells weird and I get a lot of packages." 

But Baldi has hardly settled down in the Midwest; he prefers to wander and drift. The singer repeatedly looks down and apologizes for staring at his phone; he's texting his girlfriend, who lives in Paris, where he has spent most of his off-tour time as of late. The all-consuming Attack on Memory world trek had him flying from Europe, to Australia, to Israel, and his most vivid memory came at Japan's Fuji Rock Festival, performing for more than 10,000 people. "They knew all the words, and it was terrifying," he recalls with an appreciative laugh. "It was the first time I realized: Oh. I'm in a band. All right. Cool."

Cloud Nothings collectively agree that it's a miracle they made it to Attack on Memory at all. The years touring in support of the simple guitar-pop songs of 2010's Turning On and 2011's Cloud Nothings became brutal. "We played for two years where nobody came to our shows, and no one liked us," Baldi says. "On those early tours, I was so broke it was unreal," says Duke, who found work as a janitor and was on food stamps at one point. "So it was a relief to make Attack on Memory—I had been chomping at the bit to make more aggressive music from the beginning."

For Attack, Baldi claims there were no grand realizations, and that it was inevitable that their pool of abilities would coalesce into something more ambitious. (Duke formerly sang in an agitated punk band, while Gerycz played in a harsh improv duo called Swindlella.) "It's hard to change on purpose," Baldi says. "It would sound fake." Indeed, there's nothing insincere about the throat-scraping howl he used to get his point across on Attack. His bandmates had never heard his scream before that album's studio sessions. "We were like… 'Whoa,'" says Gerycz. "'He's really going for it. He's going to hurt himself.'"

Baldi, the son of two retired school teachers, blames his genes: "I'm continuing the family tradition of yelling at kids."

Growing up, Baldi's father performed in a cover band and had an extensive collection of rock CDs—the Clash, the Who, AC/DC—while his mother listened to classical. As a kid, he had at least four XL-sized AC/DC shirts, and in elementary school he performed "You Shook Me All Night Long" at a talent show, to the dismay of his mother. (Baldi still likes AC/DC.) In the fourth grade, at a school assembly where students were required to describe their career dreams, he declared his interest in becoming a professional skateboarder. "I was always looking for something to do that was a little bit different from everyone else," he says. 

As a quiet intellectual type, Baldi was a rarity in the Cleveland suburb of Westlake, and he never fit in with a particular group at school. Though Cloud Nothings' four albums have drawn influence from a wide range of punk rock from the 1970s through the 90s, he never identified as a punk himself. He had friends, but was a musical loner. School seemed like a waste of time. By the end of senior year, he'd skip class to play piano in the school's practice rooms. He played banjo in a musical, and guitar with the choir. "Focusing on songs helped me when I was in high school," he says, "because I didn't really like anyone."

The first time Duke met Baldi was at a show starring the singer's high school band, Ponyta—a squeaky, technicolor rock duo named after a Pokémon character. The music spoke to Duke emotionally; he picked up one of their burned CD-Rs, which featured a unicorn with rainbows shooting from its eyes on the cover. "He was this really skinny kid screaming his head off through some pedal, and I was like, 'Please, can I have your phone number?'" Duke recalls. "It was more far-out than anything I had seen."

In 2009, the first Cloud Nothings MP3s garnered interest from Baldi's Myspace friend, Kevin Greenspon, the mind behind bedroom-operation Bridgetown Records. Greenspon asked Baldi to do a Cloud Nothings tape and CD-R, which became his debut Turning On—each one hand-assembled, cut, glued, and burned—and then watched as he was rushed onto the hyper-speed internet music freeway. "He didn't let opportunities roll off his back," Greenspon says. "A lot is talent, a lot is luck, a lot is timing, but he struck a chord with all these variables and didn't crush under the pressure." 

Still, there were shaky moments. At the band's first-ever show—opening for Real Estate and Woods in Brooklyn at the end of 2009—Baldi recalls being overwhelmed. It was his first time in New York City, the show was sold-out, and the band hardly knew the songs. "When the promoter paid us," Baldi remembers, "he was like, 'Don't get used to this.'"

They soldiered on, oftentimes driving through the night after a gig to get back to some shitty day job. "Being where I'm from, it's just inside of you that if you want something, you have to work for it," Baldi says. Being in a touring band meant buying a van and getting inside of it. "I wanted to be successful," he says. "I just didn't want to do anything stupid along the way."

Here and Nowhere Else continues where Attack on Memory left off, but veiled beneath the blitzkrieg thrash are more positive angles. "I still have no direction, but now I'm more comfortable with it," Baldi says. He's been working to avoid pointless bouts of negativity stemming from confusion and self-doubt. The title is meant to promote a zen-like sort of empowerment. "It's about relying on yourself to make your own happiness," Baldi says. 

But while there is hope on Nowhere Else, there are also the remnants of a mean streak that defined Attack and the best of Cloud Nothings' early material (see: "Forget You All the Time"). "Music that is 100% happy is terrifying," Baldi says. "I would kill myself if I had to play that every night." He's trying to strike a balance, breaking away from the notion that Cloud Nothings is just a forum for angst and depression. "If music is one constant emotion, then it's not real," Baldi says. "But if you include the positive and negative and everything in between—which I don't think we do, but I'm learning—that's what makes it feel real."

Baldi writes lyrics by the rule of first-thought, best-thought; the words on Nowhere Else were penned the day before he sang them in the studio, an attempt to tap into something genuine by not over-thinking. Silence, as a theme, recurs on nearly every song. He's keeping to himself, imagining a simpler life, trying to suppress his pinging mind. "People are uncomfortable with silence," Baldi says, "but there are a lot of people who I wish would shut up." These new Cloud Nothings songs lack grand gestures, but hold quietness and privacy as virtues. "There was a period when we were touring a lot and I was going crazy," Baldi says. "A simple life seemed very strange, but also like something to aspire to." He began to sell off his belongings, including his record collection, and got an apartment.

Considering what silence can mean today, I mention the fierce UK post-punk band Savages, and their manifesto-towing debut album Silence Yourself. Baldi laughs. "We don't take it that seriously," he says. This lack of pretension seems purposeful in its own way, but when I later ask the songwriter about the only lyric on the new record that could arguably be tacked as political—"New creeps gonna rule the nation/ I don't like that sound"—it turns out to be a mere oversight. "Sorry to bum you out," he says, "but that was a placeholder lyric that I kept in. It doesn't mean anything to me."

Baldi is a cautious interviewee—his friends agree that he's a pretty guarded person in general—but in conversation he does not put up a cold facade of distance. Throughout our exchanges over the course of a few months, he consistently appears more forthcoming and at ease discussing anything but himself. Of the many cultural tips I pick up are the work of 19th-century comics artist Kate Carew and Belgian coldwave band Isolation Ward. The same goes for his bandmates; when Duke tells me that he recently made a drawing of the radical beat writer Amiri Baraka—"I try to make people beautiful, but they [end up] hideously ugly"—I feel bad informing him that the poet just died.

"It makes me uncomfortable to talk about myself, and the band is an extension of myself in a very real way," Baldi says. "It's the way I was raised—being where I'm from, if you talked about yourself all the time, people hated you." Baldi likes artists with mystique: a record you pick up and can't find anything about online. He mentions a 1967 album by the enigmatic Charlie Nothing, and his favorite record of 2013 was from a band called Naan, who he also knows nothing about. "Our goals are not to be on the radio," he says.

A few days later, Baldi writes me an email from Paris to explain how jazz influenced his use of space on the new album—a topic we'd touched on when he mentioned primal free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. "The energy in the music that I like is derived from the space between the notes—actual silence, as well as the way the chords themselves are formed," Baldi writes. "There are a lot of spots where a drum fill from Jayson interacts with a chord change or melody in a way that makes me feel good, which is something I generally only notice in jazz or classical music."

From a compositional standpoint, he cites Duke Ellington and Kind of Blue pianist Bill Evans. "I tend to approach guitar more like piano," Baldi explains. He's played piano all his life (that's his playing at the beginning of Attack's ominous "No Future/No Past"). Baldi also played the saxophone from a young age—he can "shred"—and briefly majored in sax during a short stint in college. "Rather than just playing big power chords, I tried to make things complex and move around in a more interesting way," he says, "like each of my fingers was a different instrument." 

And perhaps these potential psychic complications are why he often aims for something instinctual and direct in his art. "Over-thinking is the most dangerous thing for me, because I'm definitely capable of it," he writes. "If I start with something very simple and build on that, the result is much more true to myself. And being true and real is the most important thing to me."