“Goon,” a Los Angeles-based indie rock neo-psych band, performed at Warehouse XI in Somerville on Oct. 2. The band — consisting of frontman Kenny Becker, drummer Andy Polito, guitarist Dillon Peralta and bassist Tamara Simons — took to Boston as part of their first headline tour across the U.S. following the release of their album, “Dream 3.” As its title suggests, the record feels like a sequence of dream-like landscapes, each vibrant with their lush vocals and spacious reverb, yet bearing a profound sense of turbulence. Much like the anxiety that permeates the most idyllic dream, Goon’s third full-length album exists in this atmospheric tension. Becker spoke to The Justice about how the record came to be this way, and the aesthetic visions that shaped it.

The Justice: “How does the sound of a given project develop based on thematic content?”

Becker: “I don’t usually come up with [themes] at the beginning. I sort of figure it out as I go, and I find that that tends to be a more rewarding and exciting way to make anything, really. With this record especially, I didn’t have much stronger of an idea than that I wanted to do something more destructive in terms of the way it’s recorded, and [with] a lot of more lo-fi elements, like  cassette tapes and stuff like that. And then the themes sort of emerged.”

The Justice: “And by destructive, do you mean just on a sonic level?”

Becker:  “Yeah, but not in the sense that it’s overly distorted or anything. It’s more that we intentionally would close the door to making more and more revisions. Nowadays, you can edit the tiniest little parameter up until the moment you’re about to send it off. I just found it’s so much more intuitive. If, with a reverb, for example, we scroll through some options — or maybe we’re using a pedal — and we find something that sounds kind of cool, it’s like, ‘All right, print it. Whole song. It’s baked in and you can’t mess with it anymore.’ Because we will never really care that much about the reverb ever again. You like to think that by leaving your options open and because you have these digital plugins that you can endlessly tweak like, ‘Oh, maybe I can make it better tomorrow or next week, so we’ll save where it is now and maybe tweak it later.’ But … I’m never gonna do that. And it’s so much more freeing in that way, to get so destructive. 

‘Disposable’ is also a helpful term for me because if it totally crashes and burns and I find myself [regretting it] after having committed to all of these sonic decisions later down the line, I can just scrap it and do a new song. But what’s funny is we didn’t end up doing that. We kept everything like it was.”

The Justice: “It sounds like it’s more like you’re molding what you’ve already made, and committing every step of the way.”

Becker: “And sort of forcing yourself to commit, but not just for the sake of committing. A lot of people will reference the Beatles — they had to commit all the time to a drum sound, [for example], before they could record anything else because their process was so technically limited. They were like committing with a lot of forethought, like, ‘well, these drums might be mixed in this way, so let’s at least give them a good amount of punch and whatnot.’ So it’s sort of like committing with a little bit of forethought, but also not knowing where things are gonna go.”

The Justice: “So once you have the track down, do you write the lyrics afterward? And did you find that the lyrics were inspired by the track you had committed to, or by a separate thing?”

Becker: “The full set of lyrics tends to be basically the last thing. But [for] the singing melody, I will try to force myself to come up with something as early as possible. I sometimes even think of it like shapes. If [the melody] is a line that starts here, what if it steps down, or what if it goes long, swoops up and then steps down? And then [I] try these different [techniques], like throwing your voice or staying monotone and just reacting to how they make you feel. Inevitably, in that process, a couple words will come out of the gibberish mumbling, or at least vowel shapes like ‘oohs’ or ‘ahs.’ Sometimes that can be a clue later on to find a word that ends with ‘ooh’ that fits here with this many syllables.”

The Justice: “How do you figure the sound of ‘Dream 3’ aligning with the lyrical content? If that’s important to you.”

Becker: “I do think [of this album] being more of a studio creation, so to speak. The album that we did before this one, ‘Hour of Green Evening,’ was much more of [a] live band [creation]. We rehearsed the songs for a couple weeks and then we went to the studio, laid it down live and then added overdubs of synths and strings later. For the most part, it’s a pretty live record, [with a] live band foundation. This one, by contrast, is not really based on that. It’s much more built up. Like, we would just come up with a drum sound and sometimes I would play the drums, sometimes Andy would, sometimes our friend Braden. I guess because it was more of a studio creation and a little bit more pieced-together, I tried to reflect that looseness with the lyrics.

“I sometimes like to think of things as tensions, and you can kind of do it with anything. In this case, it was the tension between lyrically cryptic [and] intuitive –- just say whatever and see how it feels on a page or out of your mouth.Then on the other end of the tension is very direct, expository, saying exactly what you mean. Or, even saying the name of an actual friend of mine — there ended up being a lot of names on the record like Daniel, Katie, Olivia, Tamara. When I feel myself going one way on the tension scale, I try to see what happens if I go a little bit the other way, and try to never be one all the way through. But yeah, this record I think was leaning that way, but not always.”

The Justice: “Leaning which way? Towards the cryptic side?”

Becker: “A little bit. But then, and that becomes the fun, but also really hard task at the end to try to try to tie it together. I like to assume that the people that listen to our music are smart, you know? And that they don’t need to be beaten over the head with the meaning of something and they could be okay with the ambiguity.”

The Justice: “I was interested by the fact that your band is LA-based but there’s a lot of nature imagery in your songs. That’s not usually what I think of when I think of LA.”

Becker: That’s a good point actually. It’s true. It’s really true. 

The Justice: “So how do you feel that the world around you influences your sound and your lyrics?”

Becker: I grew up in San Diego, close to like a canyon, basically, and I spent a lot of time there growing up as a kid, even into adulthood. And, even in LA there are some really beautiful nature spots, and I grew up going camping a lot, so I think there’s a real soft spot for that with me, even though I do live in LA When I was in college, I fell in love with landscape painting and being outside. It wasn’t until I took this summer class for landscape painting that it really clicked. You get out of the studio and you’re just looking at something and seeing the light conditions and the shapes [of the] everyday world. I think that was like a switch-flip to my brain. All of a sudden,  anywhere I go — [the] grocery store or riding the bus — I’m just thinking about ‘what would this be if it was a painting?’” 

The Justice: “We saw that you have an art account on Instagram too. Can I ask, what’s the reasoning behind the red ladder?”

Becker: “When I first came up with it, I was thinking it just felt like a cool symbol. I also really liked the idea of making an album art [where] even if you don’t know the name of the album or artist, it can be, ‘the one with the red ladder on it.’ But then I was thinking, especially with that record ‘Hour of Green Evening,’ in my mind it was that kind of transitional, pre-twilight time of day. Its fleetingness is very apparent. Then it goes to dusk and then nighttime, and those feel like longer stretches of time. Those are, in fact, just as fleeting but we’re not as aware of it. [As for the ladder], it’s not a place that you stay, it’s a transitional tool. And so [using a red ladder was] to focus on the symbol of fleeting transitional space. It’s just floating in the painting, not grounded. [It] doesn’t really have a shadow. It’s just pasted on there. 

The Justice: “It seems like you’re a very visual creator. Would you say that applies to your songwriting as well?”

Becker: “Absolutely. I feel like I think about music and creating in general in painting metaphors all the time. There’s so many good ones.”

The Justice: “You’ve spoken about how the vision for this album was very different from how it began to feel once you started the recording process after some big changes in your personal life. We discussed how the album evolved, in terms of sound, through the recording process. Are there any other major ways that the project departed from the original vision?”

Becker: “Yeah. It was a huge breakup is what it was. It’s kind of fascinating now, it began as just like, ‘I’m so excited about this next album. ‘cause we’re gonna try a bunch of new stuff’ and I had found Claire, who had a studio, so it was just this really exciting thing. And then it was like my life exploded. The breakup happened over the period of a few months, and I was super depressed and didn’t make any music in that time, and really just was out of my mind with grief basically. By the time I returned to [the album], it had already begun to feel very different. I will always procrastinate [lyrics], so a number of them had been written already, most of them [hadn’t been]. I was actually going back to [the] tension thing, cryptic and clear. I [didn’t] want this to be a breakup album, but at the same time, I don’t wanna like deny myself the ability [to] be honest, so I tried to ride that line, but also not think about it too much, [just] if something felt good to write in the moment. It’s almost cliche. Music [and] creativity can be so cathartic or like a way to process things. And I did not go into making this album with that as an intention, but it very much became that. It became a real outlet for grief in a way.” 

The Justice: “Of the lyrics that you already had written, did you go back and change anything or were you committing to what you had already written?” 

Becker: “That’s a good question. One of them was fully written, this song called ‘Closer To’ and there’s a line in there about ‘next one is a big one’ and it just sort of says that, like it’s not necessarily clear what it’s referring to. And I kind of liked that it sounds ominous, but what’s crazy is that I wrote that not knowing. It sounded like a cool thing that’s for someone to hear if they’re going through something, not knowing that I, in fact, was the one who was about to have my fucking world [changed].” 

The Justice: “Weirdly prophetic.”

Becker: “Crazy. And I think there’s a couple others. ‘For Cutting the Grass’ is an interesting one ‘cause that one straight up, I just thought it would be cool as a prompt or as the lyrics were forming, I was like, this feels like this is about aliens invading during a baseball game or something. We were like, what would that [look like]?”

The Justice: “You said that the recording process, or just the whole process, post-breakup was very cathartic for you and a way to process your grief. How would you say touring plays a role in that?”

Becker: “These songs were not rehearsed much before recording. In fact, I think the most we’ve actually rehearsed or played them has been on this tour, after the record is out, so it’s been kind of a fun [experience]. These songs feel even more different than how they began: they changed. And now it’s like the live version and it’s this sort of third iteration. It’s cool to share it with friends and bandmates and get a chance to just play ‘em kind of every night and figure out new things to try. You inevitably get to a point where you’re like, ‘oh, damn it would’ve been cool if we had figured that out before recording it.’”

The Justice: “Different in what way?” 

Becker: “There really is something magical about a live band that’s locked in and these four people operating as one thing. And you’re listening to yourself contributing, but also actively listening to everybody else. I just love what that does to your mind and its state, you know? But there’s just these little [differences], like, you can tell Dillon always kind of holds back here. He’s our guitar player. Or like Andy maybe ramps up in [a particular] way on ‘For Cutting the Grass,’ for example. I drummed on the recording, but now Andy’s playing it and just that alone makes it [have] a different flavor. He’s sort of trying to replicate what I did on the record, but then can’t help but have his Andy-ness be imparted on it.” 

The Justice: “So what’s been your favorite moment on tour so far?” 

Becker: “It’s been a really good one. It’s crazy ‘cause we’ve done a lot of opening for other bands on tour, but we’ve never really like properly headlined a tour before, let alone one that’s like six weeks or however long this one is. I was really nervous ‘cause when you’re opening for other bands, especially if they’re a little bigger, it’s kind of like if there’s people there, it’s like, ‘oh, sick. Now our task is to try to make them be fans of us.’ But if there’s not people there, you’re almost like, ‘well, it’s not our show,’ so you don’t feel the sting, so to speak. What I’ve realized is that sting of a lightly attended show is really nothing to scoff at at all. Some of the lightly attended shows on this tour where we played to like 15 people in Oklahoma City was one of the sweetest nights ever. It was just like 15 people in Oklahoma City that were actually big fans. That’s crazy that we had people that wanted to come out. I also haven’t been drinking on this tour and I feel like that’s really helped my mental state: I’ve felt very even emotionally so, and not really that tired at all. It’s pretty remarkable how much alcohol will mess you up emotionally for a few days. Being on tour even more so.” 

The Goon concert itself translated the ethereal production of “Dream 3” into an energetic and vivid live-band performance, displaying Goon’s years of experience and synergy as a band. Looking into local concerts from smaller bands can often lead to a highly memorable night and the discovery of a new favorite artist.