When Seth and Scott Avett went to meet with producer Rick Rubin to begin working on their ninth full-length release in November of 2014, they knew exactly what kind of album they wanted to make. If their last album, 2013’s Magpie and the Dandelion, had been the most polished album in their catalog, this one would be the opposite. They would assemble the entire band—now having evolved from their original trio into a road-tested seven-piece—in a room at Rubin’s Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, and they’d bash out the songs like they had in the old days. Raw harmonies, live-in-the-studio arrangements, heart-on-sleeve performances—this album would be the reply to everyone who said their brand of homespun Americana had gotten a little too clean and tidy. Rubin, working with the band for fourth time, had different plans.

“So when we got there, the first thing Rick said was, ‘Number one, let’s pretend it’s 2005 and it’s just y’all three,’” recalls Seth Avett. “And that was immediately not what I had in mind. So we took two days to record all of the songs, just me and Scott and Bob [Crawford]. Then, while we were tracking the record, Rick had a whole other situation going on there, where he had an engineer doing remixes of all of the songs. So we ended up having all of these oddball, weirdo remixes,” he continues, his tone suggesting he’s still puzzling over the process. “A big thing we’ve learned from Rick is that you don’t necessarily know the best way to approach a song just because you wrote it,” he concludes. “I was there to be on the journey.”

Rubin charted a journey that allowed for some compromise, however. As the Avetts and Crawford banged out over 30 acoustic demos, an engineer (working in a detached studio created out of Bob Dylan’s 1960s tour bus) would swap out the band’s acoustic guitars and banjos with electronic beats and synthesizers and build a new arrangement around the vocals. Then, once the brothers had combed through the remixes, the entire seven-piece band would record a new version that combined elements of both. The result was True Sadness, a set of songs quite unlike anything they’d yet recorded.

“I was just surprised on every one of these things,” Avett admits. “These shouldn’t even be considered remixes; this was a process of reimagining the songs. Something that was half-time might become double-time. Something that was an outlaw country-sounding kind of song might turn into a Beach Boys song. It was bending our minds, that process. The only thing that would be original by the end of it was the vocal, and that was it. We stepped out and then stepped back in, and that engineer would have been putting hours of work in reimagining, just to break us out of our assumptions about a song.”

Though Avett says the most radical reinventions were left on the cutting room floor, what remains is revealing in its own right. Banjo mingles with creeping electronic bass lines and skittering beats on the bouncy Beatlesque pop of “You Are Mine.” The title track opens with old school breakbeats that sound like they could have been lifted off one of the albums Rubin made with Run-D.M.C. in the ‘80s. Perhaps the best marriage of the old and new is “Satan Pulls the Strings,” a downhome electronic dirge that is part gospel stomper, part dance-pop anthem. The majority of the album’s 12 tracks stay closer to the band’s familiar, richly textured Americana palette, but despite the general celebratory feel of the arrangements, this time there was a newfound undercurrent of doubt and despair in the writing.

“I hate to say it/But the way it seems is that no one is fine,” Avett sings on the woozy title track, one that posits that every person will reveal their inherent brokenness once you get to know them. “Fisher Road to Hollywood” is a classic story song whose protagonist abandons all to search for fame, ending up empty and alone. There’s a gently rolling ballad about looking forward to death that manages to be neither a downer nor a trite platitude (“No Hard Feelings”) and an aw-shucks sing-along about life’s most pervasive disappointments (“Smithsonian”). There’s even a playful, Jimmie Rodgers-aping examination of a crumbling marriage that likely will be seen as referencing Avett’s 2013 divorce (“Divorce Separation Blues”). Never before have they written songs with so much dark humor and subtlety.

“Coming to terms with having intense joy and intense sadness simultaneously is a big theme here,” Avett continues. “I’m 35, almost 36. Scott’s 39, almost 40. Bob is 45. We’re grown men that have come up against some genuine struggles. We’ve seen death, and we’ve seen cancer and sickness. We all have a fair amount of scars. But I think a big unifying factor in the record would be that that’s okay. Because that’s what life is: it’s joy and sadness together.”

That contrast between upbeat arrangements and downcast sentiments serves them well, and True Sadness ends up being the most nuanced release in the Avett Brothers’ catalog as a result. It’s also their most surprising album, not only because of the occasionally jarring combination of sonic textures but also because the Avetts are finally subverting the traditions they’ve drawn from for the past 16 years. And in a strange and unexpected way, the process of tearing down and rebuilding their songs seems to have clarified what is essential in their songwriting. True Sadness might not have been the album they intended to make, but it’s the one they needed to make.

“I’m sure there are people that would agree with you and people that would disagree with that,” Avett says with a laugh. “Some folks don’t want to be surprised. Certainly I could understand the attitude of ‘I don’t need the Avett Brothers playing Nine Inch Nails. I can get Nine Inch Nails from Nine Inch Nails. I want to hear the Avett Brothers do banjo and guitar songs about breakup and love,’” he says, then sighs. “But I think that whatever it is that makes us who we are, it’s always going to be there regardless of what influences are at play.”

For more Avett Brothers content, check out this performance video from 2008 in the player below.