Smoosh strolled through Vegas with Tilson watching a Queen lightshow. Then a man in a gold unitard did things with racquetball racquets:

Smoosh sisters Asy and Chloe are supernatural creatures of sound. They are emitters, a telepathic battery of keyboards and drums, imbibing horchata, and they have just self-released their third album, called Withershins. For the past two years, Smoosh have been living in Sweden, writing, honing, growing, and adding their 13-year-old sister, Maia, to the mix on bass. Now 18 and 16 years old, respectively, Asy and Chloe have amassed much experience from playing shows worldwide and touring with bands like Bloc Party, Tokyo Police Club, Eels, and the Dresden Dolls. Smoosh have been a band for 10 years, but in some ways, they’ve just begun. We spoke and played the video game Galaga. They destroyed me, then gave me chocolate ice cream:

Smoosh: "We Are Our Own Lies"

Was your songwriting different for this album? Has your songwriting changed over the years?
Asy: I do think my songwriting has changed in some ways. I think the songs on Withershins wouldn’t work to be written the way our older songs were written. We used to just go to our instruments and jam together, kind of writing the song as we played. We didn’t use computers, and everything happened live. Sometimes we’d even improvise songs in the studio [“Massive Cure” and “Organ Talk”]. Now, we like to blend things together, different sounds and instruments, and the computer works great for that. It kind of opened a new world to us.

The arrangements and compositions on Withershins seem a bit more complex. How do growth and experience and playing a ton of shows translate through to your songwriting?
I think it makes sense that the compositions on Withershins are a little more complex, because there was a big gap between this album and the last album [Free to Stay]. There were four years where we were working on songs and playing live. We were so ready to write an album when the time came around where we weren’t touring and had time to devote full concentration to writing. When we were on tour, we wrote down all our ideas. Whenever I got inspired by something or thought of something I wanted to try in a song, I would write it down. We wanted to expand our sound by trying a lot of new things on Withershins.

Read and comment on the whole interview here.