Mood Swings, the new album from Small Sins, starts with a bang—literally. “If you give me the gun, well, I'll shoot myself in the foot” are the first words on the album sung by Small Sins frontman/mastermind Thomas D’Arcy. He doesn’t stop there. Nearly every song on Mood Swings ricochets with gun imagery—a stunning contrast to the album’s hypnotic tapestry of shimmering electronics, organic instrumentation, and D’Arcy’s ongoing quest for the most shameless pop hooks possible. “It wasn’t on purpose,” D’Arcy explains, claiming that, other than a short stint in his university gun club, he’s no firearms enthusiast. “It’s a good metaphor for what I was trying to say this time. A loaded weapon is something anxious: there’s always the underlying potential to explode.”

Don’t be surprised, then, if Mood Swings, D’Arcy’s second album under the Small Sins moniker, blows up: he’s aiming at newer, higher targets following the success of Small Sins’ self-titled 2006 Astralwerks debut. Small Sins proved a masterpiece of wistful chamber-pop, its hushed, electro-tinged narratives of love lost and found finding wide acclaim. Blender called it a “lovely piece of campfire synth-pop”, while Spin opined memorably, “Imagine if Jack White had a crush on Kraftwerk.” But after touring the US relentlessly with the likes of Scissor Sisters, The Kooks, The Little Ones, Sloan, and Radio 4, D’Arcy’s modus operandi for Small Sins began to change. For one, it started to resemble an actual rock band. Well, sort of, anyway…

Originally, D’Arcy consciously conceived Small Sins as a self-contained solo unit. A veteran of the vital Toronto, Canada indie scene that’s produced the varied likes of Arcade Fire, Feist, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Peaches, and Broken Social Scene, D’Arcy had played since 1996 in the Britpop-influenced Carnations, and was burnt out on the band dynamic’s pseudo-democracy. As a result, D'Arcy not only sang and played nearly every instrument on Small Sins’ debut, but also wrote, produced, and recorded it almost entirely on his own. However, when he put together a touring band with four exceptional musicians—Steve Krecklo (guitar, banjo, keyboards) Todor Kobakov (keyboards), Brent Follett (drums), and Kevin Hilliard (percussion, handclaps)—Small Sins started to evolve anew. D’Arcy had been puzzled by Small Sins’ initial comparisons to the likes of Postal Service and Grandaddy. Once people started seeing the band live, however, critical assessments flew all over the place. Some heard Talking Heads, or the Buzzcocks, or Neil Young—indicating that Small Sins was coming into its own sound. D’Arcy himself thinks Small Sins’ revitalized sonics sound like “‘Wilco meets Devo.” “That actually kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?,” he adds with a laugh.

D’Arcy found performing live actually transformed Mood Swings’ material, too. He’d already recorded a solo version of the new album’s first single, “On The Line”—a deceptively catchy tale of retribution with a massive singalong chorus. However, he felt it paled next to the driving live version, and re-recorded it with the full band on a day off following a Los Angeles tour stop. Even his vocals were changing as a result of the live show. “The first record’s low, whispery stuff was hard to project, so I put everything up an octave to sing it live,” he explains. “Once I started singing more, I got more creative with the melodies I was coming up with. I really found my range, and it made the new songs so much more vivid.”

Off the road, the touring ensemble found themselves occasionally writing together, making it inevitable that D'Arcy would involve the band members in the making of Mood Swings. Typically, the players rarely worked together at the same time. Instead, D’Arcy brought in individual members to add unique flavor to the songs, like Steve Krecklo’s haunting banjo plucking on the gorgeous ballad “Morning Face,” moving them between his basement, traditional studios, and other unexpected spaces (Toronto rapper K-OS, a friend of the band, even loaned D’Arcy his personal digital playground for a year). Mood Swings' experimental but collaborative approach extended even to the album’s mix process, for which D’Arcy traveled to Chicago to work with legendary studio guru John McEntire (Tortoise, Stereolab, Sea and Cake, Mary Timony). “John was great—he added so much,” D’Arcy explains. “I didn’t expect any radical changes to the songs, but then he busted out all these weird synths! I’d say, “I’m not so into this bass part; do whatever you want.’ Then I’d leave for an hour, come back and it’d be like, ‘Holy fuck!’ That wouldn’t have happened on the last record.”

Indeed, Mood Swings proves even richer and more assured than what D’Arcy himself felt he was ever capable of. Like an electro-pop remix of a Coen Brothers movie, the album belies D’Arcy’s darkly humorous ruminations on longing and revenge with seductively cheery upbeats on tracks like “On The Run” and “Drunk E-Mail. “It’s saying, ‘Just because I’m drunk, it doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m writing to you is true,’” D'Arcy explains of the latter. Each song provides a major stepping stone in D’Arcy’s mission to create the ideal pop artifact with Mood Swings: a cycle that works track-by-track for the iPod generation, but ultimately stands on its own. “I made Mood Swings for those music fans who still actually listen to albums—it should be experienced as a whole,” D’Arcy explains. “At the same time, when I was kid, I mostly listened to oldies radio hits, like Elvis and Chubby Checker, so I’m obsessed with the idea of the simple, perfect pop song. That’s the most important thing: whatever the instrumentation, I want everything to be quick, catchy, and always pop.”