Taking a new path

If there’s one thing the members of Silversun Pickups learned on their first major outing, it’s when to come in off the road.

It was a long haul when the Los Angeles indie-rock quartet, which comes to the Knitting Factory tonight, went on tour in support of “Carnavas,” its 2006 full-length debut album.

They toured the album nearly nonstop for more than two years. That took its toll and set the mood for a dark return on the follow-up record, last year’s “Swoon.”

“We started missing others back home. Personal things were being neglected and when it’s time to come home and sort things out you’re made directly aware that life goes on without you,” keyboardist Joe Lester said in a telephone interview.

“We were all trying to get a normal life back and that added stress put everyone in an angsty mood when we were writing that record. The songs exist in that form for a reason.”

Band members are over the angst, thanks partly to channeling it into the album. And they’re using the experience to keep from duplicating the stress that steered “Swoon’s” sharp edges.

They also picked up a tip or two from former tourmate Muse.

“Their thing is to really limit the amount of straight touring,” Lester said. “If you do that for a year, everyone starts to lose their minds.

“This tour is split into chunks. It’s helpful to go home and take a break and come back feeling refreshed and then dive back into headlining a show.”

While “Swoon” has its distinctive bite, it’s tempered with a warmer sound than its predecessor, marked by the presence of a 16-piece string section.

“On ‘Carnavas’ there was no acoustic guitar or piano. With ‘Swoon’ we wanted to add more of an organic feel with the strings,” said Lester.

“We had never done anything like that,” he added. “(Lead singer/guitarist Brian Aubert) would hum it out and use horror movie terminology to describe what he was going for.

“The day we went in and actually did strings it was pretty awesome. We’re sitting there watching this group of orchestral musicians totally figure this stuff out and nail it in three takes.”

In live performances, the string parts are sometimes replaced by new synth parts played by Lester, other times removed altogether.

“We use overdubs in the studio and layering has always been a big thing for us. But we just can’t replicate that live without backing tracks,” he said.

“We’re not a band that does that. Some songs have no strings of any kind on them live and it’s just different.”

Touring “Swoon” has been better for the band’s mental health. How that will play out on the next record has yet to be seen, but Lester expects the strategy to be on a bigger scale, more like writing a set than a song.

“We do a lot of deconstructing. It’s just the way our curiosity works, sort of like monkeys putting a puzzle together, exploring where songs fit in the spectrum,” he said. “More and more we’re all listening for the space where we’d like to have songs go.

“After ‘Carnavas’ we started putting more thought in that direction, thinking about big things for the next album, like when to go way quieter or way faster. When we start talking like that it’s a pretty good indication that it’s time to stop touring and start writing again.”