Photo by Holly Andres

As Nikki Nack, the joyously fearsome new album from Merrill Garbus' tUnE-yArDs, cartwheels along, one primal line surfaces: "Oh my god, I use my lungs!" The sentiment is archetypally tUnE-yArDs—a rebel yell that's exultant, thrilled, and terrified at the same time, like the look in the eyes of a person who's discovered how loud she can scream.

“Speaking up, speaking out—that's a theme that will always be there for me,” Garbus tells me in a New York City cafe one brutally cold recent day. "But I still have that hesitation: Can I really tell you the truth?” She's just stepped off a West Coast red-eye and is due back on a return flight in a few hours. But despite working on four hours sleep, her eyes are alive and eager; three years after the release of her brilliant 2011 album w h o k i l l, she’s ready to leap back into the fray.

Nikki Nack contains some of the catchiest music she’s made to date, a fact she’s clearly proud of. There is a harsher digital edge to the percussion—the result of some dedicated woodshedding on Garbus’ part—and the songs are both wilder-spirited and more contained. The chaos is still there, but instead of allowing it to trample over the edges of her songs, Garbus is riding astride it.

Pitchfork: To me, this album sounds much catchier than w h o k i l l. How did that shift come about?

Merrill Garbus: I really went all the way back to square one: I walked into an open public library and checked out Molly-Ann Leikin's [1987] book How to Write a Hit Song. I learned that the chorus should hit in the first 30 seconds. That was a big one. And just a lot of really nuts-and-bolts stuff: "You need to respect your writing time, make a date with yourself and keep it." And she has great exercises for brainstorming: "Picture a red schoolhouse. Now write everything you can describing that red schoolhouse. Is there a boy playing basketball outside?" I really needed to unlearn everything I had done so far.

Pitchfork: Why the reverse-engineering?

MG: I got kind of sick of myself. After hearing so much about yourself and your own music, you say, "I know it's not all about me, so what is it all about?" I had to go and figure that out. And I took voice lessons last spring—just learning about belting and how to do it healthily. My voice sounds different to me on this record. There’s a new song called "Hey Life" that actually came out of one of the exercises I was doing.

I just felt so energetically depleted after the w h o k i l l tour. I’m still adjusting to the fact that this is my job. I don't get to just goof around with my looping pedal and everything's fun and rosy and then there's applause. The applause stopped when we stopped touring, you know?

Pitchfork: How did you kickstart the recording process after that revelation?

MG: At the beginning of last year, I basically said, "Oh shit, I have nothing. I should pretend that I have an actual job." Which, it turns out, I do. Starting the first week of January 2013, I went to the studio Monday through Friday, basically like a nine-to-five, and told myself every day: "Just do two musical ideas."

That first month, I had a series of parameters. The first week was only drum machines: I learned a lot about analog drum machines and digital ones this time around. The second week was no drum machines, no electronics whatsoever. So I was using a little frame drum with some sticks, trying some of the Haitian drumming I'd been studying up to that point. 

"Most artists I know, no matter their medium, go through depressions, ups and downs, serious self-doubt.
I definitely questioned my abilities."

Pitchfork: Where were you recording?

MG: The studio in Oakland was literally a shipping container. It's in this neighborhood called Fruitvale—as in Fruitvale Station Fruitvale—and it's pretty nitty-gritty. There's always a lot of drug drama, shouting, cars driving by and blasting music. We're in the middle of that, [tUnE-yArDs bassist] Nate [Brenner] in the practice studio and me in the little shipping container next to it, banging on drums. I literally baked in that shipping container all summer.

Pitchfork: Where did the name Nikki Nack come from?

MG: Sinko was the initial title, and then it was Find a New Way, which is the title of the opening track—that was my dad's idea actually. Bless his heart. He was like, "You're really finding a new way here, we should call it that!" But it seemed really cheesy.

So my friend and I were reading all of the lyrics to the album, and he picked out the phrase, "Nikki Nack." There's something about it that's tUnE-yArDs-y in an onomatopoetic way, but there's also a "nick nack paddy-whack give a dog a bone" thing. Nikki Nack also shows up as a character in one of the songs, and that felt appropriate. It feels like the album was named after somebody. It had its own personality.

Pitchfork: One of the earliest lines on “Find a New Way” finds you saying that you should never sing again. Did you actually consider that?

MG: All the time. It sounds absurd now, but most artists I know, no matter their medium, go through depressions, ups and downs, serious self-doubt. I definitely questioned my abilities. I don't have a degree in composition that helps me start at A and get to B and then C. I don't have training—that's why I took voice and drum lessons. I went and took dance lessons, too. But you can only take so many lessons, you know?

And I feel older. I actually am older, but I also feel older, which is different from the last record. There's a lot of addiction around me; heavy, heavy stuff within my community that really shook me in an adult way, where I said, "Wow, I'm almost 35." That was an adult moment that I had this year.