Sometimes, in the creative life of a rock band, there comes a moment of supreme direction-changing clarity. Usually, it happens when the atmosphere has soured, when artistic differences erupt and the status quo no longer serves. For Dr. Dog, the galvanizing moment of destiny rose out of relative tranquility.

After an extended run of tour dates, the famously boisterous Philadelphia five-piece found itself in a big studio in Atlanta, beginning work on a new album with producer Ben Allen (Gnarls Barkley).

The first few songs were ready. The setting was chill. They jumped in with all the best intentions, says bassist and songwriter Toby Leaman: “It was totally cool; we had a lot of fun that week. It seemed like the record was on its way.”

Then the band went back out to finish the tour. After a few days away from the studio, both Leaman and the band’s other songwriter, multi-instrumentalist Scott McMicken, had the same thought: Things were just a bit too easy, too settled.

“We started debating what to do,” Leaman recalls, “and after a few minutes, it just came out: ‘Why work with anybody?’ We’d branched out with [2010’s] Shame Shame [which was partially produced by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith)] and learned a lot. We didn’t know what we might be capable of doing. We both realized we wanted to find out.”

“At the time, it felt like a dick move, to be honest,” McMicken says. “Of course, we didn’t want to create weirdness with Ben and we felt insecure about telling our manager and the label. But as soon as the idea was out there, it was instantly clear this was what we had to do. Very quickly it went from doubt to ‘we got this.’”

And then, just as quickly, the band repaired to its own studio, in a converted loft on an industrial-wasteland street in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. Two months later, Dr. Dog had pretty much completed work on Be the Void, at once the most irreverently catchy and most deliriously weird set of songs that they have released to date.

Longtime fans may hear the new work as a continuation of the cheerful, scruffy, unpretentious pop worship that has been Dr. Dog’s meal ticket since 2005’s Easy Beat. But there’s a significant change in temperament: The band sounds like it is finally – and fully – owning their sound, embracing their potential for sweetness and also rawness, loving their quirks and many apparent contradictions. There’s wicked confidence oozing through the tracks.

In these songs, the irrepressibly goofy coexists with the transcendent, and hard-charging rhythm guitar attitude walks arm-in-arm with splendidly floral and unapologetically pretty vocal arrays. Sure, there’s skill involved in the reboot of classic rock and pop tropes. But what’s more striking is the heart: At the core of Be the Void is a conviction that has been only intermittently evident on previous works.

You sense that these accomplished scholars have tired of the class-clown antics and are finally getting around to believing in something and meaning it; they’ve abandoned the too-clever conceits of old in favor of howling confessions and existential cries and occasionally unsettling, or at least disarming, observations on what it means to be alive.

The instrumental touches augment this: The grooves are deeper, the guitars are more abrasive. For the first time, the band has created a studio record that approaches the supercharged energy and wild-eyed abandon of their live shows. Excuse the reach, but somehow Be the Void taught these guys how to fully Be Dr. Dog.

When you first enter Meth Beach, it looks like a Hollywood set designer’s vision for an indie band’s clubhouse-slash-workspace-slash-studio. A massive shrine to everything that’s lo-fi and analog and thriftstore chic, it’s a place where you could lose happy hours in the search of a perfect beautiful sound. Especially if you happen to play keyboard or guitar.

Tattered blue and purple parasols dangle from the ceiling, in assymetrical rings around a mirrored disco ball. ( “[It] helps the mood,” McMicken says dryly.) Haphazardly hung Christmas lights outline the frame of the control room window. Against one wall are shelves with touring cases and stacks of drum hardware. A vintage Wurlitzer electric piano – one of two – leans on its side. Nearby, a pump harmonium waits, ready for air.

There are cables snaking all over the floor and mic stands positioned in a band-practice semicircle, with an electric space heater in the center of the room. A mascot-sized head of a white tiger sits on one stands and appears to be guarding a tall bass cabinet. What looks like a boombox from the early ‘80s is perched atop the vintage cabinet.

But this isn’t any ordinary boombox: Just underneath the massive handle, there’s a Casio-style keyboard. It’s got rhythms (cha-cha!) and a special “chord generator” feature. It makes plinking keyboardish noises as well as futuristic synthy noises, and allows the aspiring artist to record his performances on cassette. There’s even a microphone input. Most of America would regard the Fisher SC-300 as landfill food, but not Dr. Dog: Its strange keyboard sounds wormed their way into several Be the Void songs, and during tracking and mixing, the band relied on the plastic boombox speakers for playbacks.

“We listened to everything through it,” says Leaman. “Ev-ree-thing. The speakers are a little bit bigger than computer monitor speakers, but they’re so much warmer. That became our basis – if it sounded good through the Fisher, we left it alone.”

Lest a cynical visitor think the boombox is some sort of a plant designed to cadge indie cred points, McMicken gestures to another bit of gear that he calls a “secret weapon” – a ‘60s-vintage Peavey live PA rig that most recording engineers would banish to the broomcloset. “That thing is all over the record, it’s in every song and used in well over half the vocal sounds,” he says. “We used it as a preamp. It’s super-dirty and grimy and has a nice dark reverb built into it.”

“What we have finally discovered,” Leaman chimes in, “is that our palette can’t be obtained the digital way. It took us a while to become fully comfortable with that. I’d say the experimenting we did in this room was key. There was a lot more stretching out on this record. I know jamming is a bad word but that’s what we did…Everybody was into trying crazy things.”

McMicken goes further: “Making this record reminded me of that fearless feeling we had at the very beginning. Coming back here and doing this outside of the official way of making records was totally appealing and exciting to us. We drew on everything we’ve learned, but in this very free way. There were no rules. On one level, it was about returning to our origins and realizing there was something really cool about that spark.”

As on the previous five Dr. Dog albums, both McMicken and Leaman brought in fully formed songs, most of them with finished lyrics. While they share love for giddy, exuberant pop melodies, the two follow wildly different paths as writers: McMicken specializes in tart, astringent songs that tend to peer into the metaphysical abyss, while Leaman favors more straightforward declarative verses. Dr. Dog records work in part because of the balance between these contrasting approaches. A steady diet of either would grow tedious before the end of Side 1.

Be the Void suggests that both tunesmiths have grown considerably since the one-dimension punchlines of the early days. The first single, McMicken’s “That Old Black Hole,” uses upside-down cliches ( “time is racing with the clock, and I ain’t getting any older” ) to examine what it means to strive; McMicken says the lyrics to that are “me getting as close as I can to the emotional stuff I hide from myself all the time.”

Leaman’s “Vampire” chronicles the exploits of a hurtful lover through a series of tormented vocal snarls. There’s healthy irreverence running throughout, but just about every song has a line or a riff that shows deep respect for rock history. The dramatic “Get Away,” written by Leaman, turns on a proud, head-bobbing wordless vocal theme that sounds like it was airlifted in from a Wings rehearsal circa 1973.

“We both love hooks that are like a massive sledgehammer to the brain,” Leaman says. “When we started, there wasn’t much of that happening, and so we bonded over bands like Ben Folds Five. Our first guitar player Doug (O’Donnell) helped us figure out our own way – he was into bluegrass and The Beach Boys, and he got us into doing the vocal harmony stuff. Back then, it was kind of a novelty. Now, it’s ubiquitous.”

The band wasn’t under any time pressure for Be the Void, but nonetheless work progressed quickly. They’d play through a tune, develop simple arrangements and those distinctive, sometimes widely spaced vocal harmonies, and then, usually with the rhythm section all together, they’d start recording. In two months’ time, Dr. Dog logged 26 completed tracks; they joke that it took longer to agree on the final 12 songs than it did to record them.

“Everybody had one or two they felt it was impossible to leave off,” says McMicken, “and we all lost out to some degree. We thought for a minute about a double album but that seemed too much – there was a sense that the process had been so organic that we needed to just go with the ten or 12 songs that felt right together.”

Leaman credits the two years of touring around Shame Shame with helping sharpen the collective sense of what makes a good Dr. Dog song. “We’ve been doing this for a while now, and we all know what it’s like to play these songs every night for something like 18 months. You get pretty intuitive about the kinds of things that are going to work live. That was a joy of this process: We were sticking to the basics, restraining ourselves from adding tons of layers. There’s still a lot going on, but I think less than on Shame Shame. Just being aware of the live experience in that way helped the songs…we thought about how long certain songs should last, not just in terms of bringing the hook home one more time, but also asking ourselves questions like ‘Do we want to hang out in this zone for another minute?’”

Similarly, Leaman and McMicken paid more attention to the textures and contours of the songs. “We talked a bit about the bands we’ve toured with and learned from, like My Morning Jacket, and how their songs unfold naturally in a way that gets everybody involved,” Leaman says. “We never wanted to be one of those bands that starts a song way up here [puts his hand over his head], and just stays banchee – then there’s no place to go. We went for big dramatic contrasts.”

Oddly, the song that they judge to have the most extreme contrasts didn’t make the record. McMicken says the song called “Be the Void” became “just too hard to land,” and was a source of disagreement. He describes the tune as a kind of marathon, with verses that build slowly toward a culminating refrain. “It went from a fairly abstract sprawl into this huge U2-sized hook. And that became a point of contention within the band: ‘Should the hook happen early, making the song more conventional or should it move in this less obvious way with the hook just erupting one time?’ We never resolved that question, and it put the song into a weird place.”

Though most of the material was ready when tracking began, one Be the Void highlight was the outgrowth of an aimless warm-up jam. The band was setting up one day when McMicken started playing a simple idea, almost like a hymn, humming the phrase “How long must I wait” to himself over and over. As the other musicians slowly got behind their instruments, McMicken says that he began half-singing some couplets that he’d written in a notebook weeks before.

“It wasn’t any sort of linear narrative, it was just some lines I found,” he recalls. “They all seemed to have this yearning quality, almost like an old blues. They seemed to want a very simple pattern, chordwise. As we went along, we were all trying to figure out where it should go – I remember thinking, ‘Wow, we need a bridge,’ and then yelling, ‘go to the IV chord!’ because sometimes you have to rely on the fundamentals.”

McMicken says that he was a bit dazed to have created a song in such an unexpected way, and was ready to go back and attempt a proper recording of it when the engineer told him that he’d captured what they just did – there were two active microphones, one pointed at the front door of the studio and another on the bottom of the snare drum. That take became the final version of “How Long Must I Wait.” McMicken says that everyone involved left the studio elated that day: “We’d never done anything like that before. We were all astounded.”

Since their early days, Dr. Dog has seemed perpetually on the verge of the breakthrough rock bands dream about. Not long after the initial 2004 release of their second album, Easy Beat, Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times praised its “off-kilter ballads and light-headed riff-rock” in an article that generated widespread interest from the international music media.

Almost immediately, Dr. Dog became an “it” band. Ever since that initial burst, stories about the band have included predictions that widespread acclaim is just around the corner. This has been an unusual burden. When asked about having to live up to such expectation, McMicken lets out a heavy sigh and simply says “Whatever.” Though Dr. Dog’s heroes include bands known to have toiled in relative obscurity – Guided By Voices, for one – the musicians share a healthy respect for the radio pop of the 1960s and early ‘70s, during a time when commercial success and artistic excellence were not mutually exclusive.

They like the idea of creating songs that people might want to sing along with. Each of the Dr. Dog records contains a few overt (sometimes too obvious) lunges in the direction of an outright pop-rock “hit” and these are usually redeemed by other, more substantial-seeming songs. (Perhaps another measure of the band’s growth: On Be the Void, the distinctions between “light” and “heavy” aren’t so clear. A song like “Over Here, Over There,” might initially repel rock fans with its overweeningly earnest, almost ABBA-like melody, yet winds up offering disarmingly profound insights.)

McMicken says that the band once struggled with those Next Big Thing expectations, but not anymore: "It was pretty crazy there for a while. Every interview people would ask us, “Is this the one?” And, think about it – what can you say that doesn’t sound totally ridiculous? We’re lucky to have a manager who takes the long view and really doesn’t push us; and all of us are more interested in building something that can go for a while."

He pauses, launching into a meditation on the modern music business and how the definition of “success” is undergoing deep and constant revision. How, he wonders, does an act know when it has “made it” in this climate? His conclusion, after a few minutes of musing aloud, is that the most important thing for an artist is to have clear and meaningful individual goals – his or her own goals, not just sales targets.

“Hey look, for a long time we have been happy to not have day jobs,” he says. "That’s big for us. We never had outrageous expectations; we wanted to keep reaching people and that has happened – every record’s done better than the one before, and we’re playing bigger places. After the last record, we toured in a bus for the first time, not a van. Nice change.
“Mainly, though, we’re comfortable where we’re at,” McMicken continues. “We’re having fun and I think that comes through. We know we’re lucky to play, and we’re pretty diligent about trying to get better, play harder. We get to play what we want, how we want – isn’t that making it?”