Wye Oak revisits the past to create new album, ‘Tween’

If albums are snapshots of a specific time and place in a band’s career, then Wye Oak’s “Tween” is a document of growth spurts and awkward phases that have been glossed over by experience. It’s technically the band’s fifth studio release, which was unexpectedly dropped online in June, but it’s not exactly a standard LP.

“We didn’t want to do a traditional release, because this isn’t a traditional record,” said Jenn Wasner, the band’s singer and guitarist. “It was important to us that people understood this wasn’t the next Wye Oak record, but instead a completely different thing that stands on its own.”

Wasner describes the album as being “constructed in one era and finished in another,” because seven of its eight tracks were initially written between the recording of the band’s 2011 album “Civilian” and 2014’s “Shriek.”

“When you’re making a record, it’s sort of like you’re writing a novel,” Wasner said. “Everything ideally works toward an overarching theme and aesthetic and you have this cohesive things. The short story, on the other hand, is its own form and has its own value, but it’s a totally different thing. ‘Tween’ is sort of like a collection of short stories, whereas our other records are more like our version of the novel.”

Wasner and her bandmate Andy Stack, who perform at the Bartlett on Monday, met 15 years ago while playing in different bands in Maryland. When those groups dissolved, they decided to work as a duo, releasing their first LP, “If Children,” in 2007. Wye Oak has since developed a dreamy, sometimes bracing sound that sits somewhere between indie folk and shoegaze; any given song inspires comparisons to Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Galaxie 500 and My Bloody Valentine.

“I guess we’ve been a proper band for 10 years now, which is totally insane,” Wasner said. “That’s really hard to wrap my mind around, but it’s very cool.”

In that decade, both members of Wye Oak have started side projects – Wasner has a solo record coming out later this year, while Stack has been performing with his band called El Vy. But they’ve developed a comfortable working relationship over the years: Wasner describes Stack as “detail-oriented,” and herself as “flighty and impatient.”

“Our strengths and weaknesses mirror each other’s in a lot of ways,” she said. “A lot of the places where I fall short, at least in my mind, are Andy’s strengths. We can realize things together that we couldn’t do separately.”

“Tween” is rife with themes of personal image and self-awareness, especially in its closer, “Watching the Waiting.” Wasner says that’s the only song in the collection that was written recently, and its message serves dual purposes: It functions as a reflection on the older tracks that precede it, while also forming a stylistic bridge to whatever comes next in the band’s oeuvre.

“Hindsight is an interesting thing,” Wasner said. “I wrote that song after spending a lot of time examining those old songs from a lot of different angles … thinking about the person I was when I wrote them. That song is about perception and experience, about loving the person you are, and using that to present a more honest appearance to the world. … It ties everything together like a nice concluding paragraph.”

Even without the knowledge of its conception, “Tween” sounds like a fusion of the respective sounds Wye Oak explored on their two previous albums. Wasner says revisiting and re-purposing a handful of previously abandoned songs ended up being an enlightening experience.

“The process of making ‘Shriek’ was a huge learning experience for us both,” Wasner said. “We (improved) exponentially as producers and arrangers and players during the making of that record, because we were both challenging ourselves and trying to do something out of our comfort zone. So it was really fun to take these songs that were written in a very different time and place and finish them with a lot of the skills we had acquired since.

“It’s really satisfying to be able to look back and say, ‘Look at what we’ve learned.’”