Carlos Hernandez is not ashamed to say you should listen to his band's new album.
"I think I'm allowed to say that I'm very proud of this new album," Hernandez, frontman of the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Ava Luna, recently said on the phone while touring through Tennessee. "I've always found faults with our own work, of course — you have to push yourself to be better — but I think this is our best thing."
He's speaking about the funky, compositional-noise-pop band's third full-length album, "Infinite House," which strikes a balance between the rigid composition of 2012's "Ice Level" and the looser collaboration of last year's "Electric Balloon." (Independent label Western Vinyl released the new record earlier this month.)
The 29-year-old singer/guitarist said "Infinite House" asks the question of how to bring both of the previous approaches under one roof: "What does it mean to pull a group effort into a composition? What does composition even mean?"
On tour through June, Hernandez took a break to discuss the new album, how it was recorded and why he's like an 8-year-old Kevin McCallister before Ava Luna's headlining show at Metro Gallery on Wednesday night.
You grew up in Brooklyn. What made you stick around? Is that where you connected with your bandmates?
Three out of five of us are from New York City and we actually went to high school together. So that sort of makes sense. The other two are originally from the Boston area. I keep telling myself one day I'll get the hell out and live somewhere else, but for the time being, it's my hometown and also seems to be where there's a lot of activity. There's always been a lot of really cool music stuff, and it's a good place to be a band. I'm also involved with the Silent Barn, which is this amazing DIY venue and recording studio. There's a lot of infrastructure to support the kinds of things we do, and also it's my hometown, so I've never felt compelled to leave.
When it comes to writing and recording, does the band take a collaborative approach or do you fill more of a leadership role?
It really started off as my band years ago, and I'd write everything. I'd write all the parts and tell everyone exactly what to play, which is cool, and that kind of process has its own sorts of merits insofar as the kind of imaginary and ethereal can be transformed into reality. … But over the years, as we've been able to introduce more collaborative processes into our songwriting, it's interesting because it's not just a process question; it's an aesthetic and philosophical question too.
What's the difference between an imaginary universe and sound that exists only in your head and then you're tasked to make it real versus a collaborative process in which there's sort of an invisible current running through a room of people who actually exist in real space and time? Once you get into the area where you're kind of doing both at once, which is where we've arrived — where some of the songs are still composed, and other ones are very much sort of spontaneously generated as a group — then the question is, there must exist some sort of bridge in bridging this imaginary realm to this more literal physical realm where we all exist.
You were playing with seven members for a while, and now you're a five-piece. In what way has that influenced the direction of the band or the group dynamics?
A five-piece is a lot easier to wrap my mind around. The seven-piece, back then it was still in the era of pure composition, so it could have been a 12-piece. It could have been anything. It was a set of players that played roles that were prescribed. With a seven-person band, it probably would have been impossible to transition into a more collaborative process, just because we could barely even decide when to meet and rehearse. We could barely even decide how much money to spend on snacks or whatever; there were so many voices. It was this insane sort of constant debate and very slow bureaucracy. But with five people, it cleared up a lot, to the point where we very much function as a tightly knit group now and have sort of all fallen into a place and figured out our roles.
How does "Infinite House" compare to or build off your past work?
My hope is that you might find a very natural progression. This is the third album that we've done, and I think this one is built on the last one in a very organic way. The first one was very rigid and composed, the second one was a 180 from there [and] suddenly tore all of that down and became very loose and fun and sort of jaunty, and that came out of the task of opening the doors to collaboration. But then I felt like where the previous album might have failed was the sort of lack of cohesion as a result. It was a bunch of songs that we made together, we put them together and it was great, but what I really wanted to accomplish with this new album was take that newly opened and kind of lighter group process and sort of rein it back in, so to speak, under one roof. Hence the name "Infinite House," which is like a funny connection, the idea being that even though it's a conglomeration of voices and stories and themes, for me, the task was really to get it to sound like an album, like a complete whole with a beginning, a middle and an end.
When you start writing one album, are you already thinking about the next one? Is the band's evolution something you think a lot about?
I'm definitely always thinking about what to do next, although it might be awhile before we make another one. This basically is my main project, and I've got kind of a wandering mind, so I'm like a little kid sometimes — I get really excited and I make big plans. Like in "Home Alone," when [Kevin] draws the blueprints of his house, that whole plan. I've basically spent my whole life making those plans for myself and drawing my projects.
On the other hand though, it's kind of just as inspirational to not do that at all, and it was definitely the case with "Infinite House," where there was no plan to begin with. We just sort of came together in Mississippi and started writing, and it very naturally and organically morphed into this very dense and rich mythology that wasn't even intended. It just sort of happened. It was beyond the process. I'm not really sure what the next album will be like, but I'm definitely thinking about how we can take what we've got now and tear it apart again.
INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED AND CONDENSED