Time serves Spoon well

Spoon had been recording music, touring and building up a sterling reputation with music critics for more than a decade before one of its albums cracked the Billboard Top 10.

The Texas-based band, which plays the Knitting Factory on Monday, was founded by lead singer and guitarist Britt Daniel and drummer Jim Eno in the early ’90s, and the punky, fuzzy, Pixies-inspired pop of their early albums developed into the literate and unpredictable rock of their breakthrough albums “Kill the Moonlight” (2002) and “Gimme Fiction” (2005).

“It was certainly a good time to join up with the band,” Spoon’s current bassist Rob Pope said during a recent phone interview. “There had been a pretty gradual climb during the whole first half of that decade, ever since (the album) ‘Girls Can Tell’ came out (in 2001). Everything was ramping up to something.”

Pope joined the Spoon lineup in 2006, after his band the Get Up Kids had broken up (they’ve since reunited). It was also right before the release of Spoon’s first Top 10 album, 2007’s “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” which made it an interesting and possibly fortuitous time to become a full-time member.

“(‘Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga’) exceeded everyone’s expectations,” Pope said. “It was very cool to see the shows get bigger and bigger and bigger, but it didn’t feel like suddenly, wow, we’re a really big band.”

Spoon’s most recent album, 2014’s “They Want My Soul,” is something of a return to the band’s usual sound after the weird, raw experimentation of 2010’s “Transference.” The break between the two records is the longest of any of Spoon’s previous releases: Following the tour for “Transference,” Daniel started a side project called Divine Fits, and Eno worked as a producer for other artists.

That delay between albums served as a refresher for the band, and Pope describes the year and a half of sessions for “They Want My Soul” as a long-comfortable group getting its groove back.

“A lot of times, Britt’ll come in with songs that are either skeletons or they sound done,” Pope said. “This time he came in and we didn’t really have anything to work on. We kind of did some songwriting exercises and some weird jams. It was kind of a strange exercise for this band to do, because usually everything starts with a Britt demo.”

Either because of the hiatus or in spite of it, “They Want My Soul” has the feel of a band at the height of its creative control. You can hear the band playing around with synthesizers and vocal harmonies in ways it hasn’t before, and the record sounds like a perfect synthesis of the two vastly different albums – “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” and “Transference” – that preceded it.

“But it wasn’t like we were trying to go for that style,” Pope said. “I think it was just kind of a happy accident. … ‘Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga’ is a prettier sounding record, and ‘Transference’ was certainly an uglier one. But I think we did a pretty good job of combining those and still sounding like us.”

Pope says the band is already at work on new material, but it’s not certain when a new LP will be released: After all, this is a band that doesn’t mind taking its time.

“It takes us awhile, and everyone in the band is very meticulous about sounds and making sure that the feel of the song is right,” Pope said. “We’ll re-record drums and bass three or four times before everybody’s totally happy, and scrap stuff just because it’s not working. Luckily we’re in a position where we can take our time and make those decisions.

“We all try to be involved as much as possible, but everybody’s smart enough to get out of the way if something good is happening.”