When we talk about a band’s “growth,” we often mean simply “change”: they’ve dropped or added a string section; they’ve traded rock percussion for disco. This sort of change is usually cosmetic and predicated on ideals of perfectibility. Different variables are slotted into the same fundamental equation, with a drive toward higher levels of listener-satisfaction, salability, or both. This sort of creative arc fits seamlessly into a commercial framework where we vote, with dollars, for quality products, and expect these products to accrue quantifiable value as they are refined over time. It’s as if a band’s first album is the beta test, and each subsequent album is a new iteration of the product that should minimize the failures and build on the successes of the last.

While Brooklyn expats Liars operate under the same commercial umbrella as their peers, they are of a different breed: when we talk about “growth” vis-à-vis Liars, we mean, quite literally, “growth.” This is a band who’s never come out of beta, who reinvent themselves album by album (flouting the continuity that’s so vital to packaging and selling bands), and whose musical quest is predicated on intuition and exploration, not perfection. Anarchism is traditionally anti-government, but in the United States this has become synonymous with being anti-commerce, and while Liars profess no outward ties to anarchist movements, their bullheaded resistance to institutionalized models of stability and crystallization places their albums among the most spiritually anarchic available commercially today. Their art is dangerous, often indigestible, and transcendentally inclined: each album has been a conceptual space where individuals meet each other, in a wildly specific moment with no history or future, to manifest something that embodies that hermetic moment.

If this seems like a particularly good time to examine Liars’ creative arc, it’s because they’ve recently come full circle with their self-titled fourth LP, which finds the band completing their extraterrestrial orbit and landing in their own footprints. This sense of closure is amplified by the fact that band members Aaron Hemphill and Julian Gross have returned to California, where Liars first convened before moving to Brooklyn to make their names. An arc is all potential, but a ring offers us at least a temporary completion, and FANZINE checked in with Liars singer Angus Andrew by telephone to see how our intuitions about his band’s trajectory squared with reality. A native of Australia who now resides in Berlin, Andrew is genial and easy-going, which is belied by his imposing stature: imagine if you took Nick Cave and stretched him until he seemed about eleven feet tall, then put him in a gold lamé loincloth to grunt and howl over ceremonial percussion and paint-peeling feedback.