Atlanta five-piece Deerhunter didn’t have much fun creating their second and newest album, Cryptograms. They tried recording it first in 2005, but ended up scrapping all their work after a studio session marked by tension and panic attacks. A year later, they were in the middle of recording the first seven tracks of the album when the tape they were using spun off the reel.

“We never even thought this record was going to come out, let alone people like it,” drummer Moses Archuleta said.

But Cryptograms did come out in January 2007, and people did like it. The album’s twelve songs are sequenced in the order they were recorded, making the difference between the band’s recording sessions obvious: The first seven tracks are a mix of dark ambient instrumentals and blisteringly hypnotic rock, while the last five are mostly gauzy pop. Web magazine Tiny Mix Tapes called it a “near-masterpiece,” while Dusted said it was “the kind of record that should be played in every teenage bedroom in America.”

Deerhunter will come to Chicago for the first time on Wednesday, April 4, when they play at the Empty Bottle. In a phone interview with North by Northwestern, Archuleta talked about the “mythology” surrounding Cryptograms, the day jobs of indie rockers and what happens when a bag lady gets on stage.

NBN: It seems like every review of Cryptograms mentions the process of making the album – the multiple recording sessions, the difficulty of recording, the tape filling up. Is it important to understand all that to understand the album?

Archuleta: Yeah, I think it definitely helps. Just in the sequencing, chronological order, I feel like it’s the kind of record you really need to listen to from beginning to end to understand the whole idea behind it, and knowing the circumstances behind it aids in that lesson. It gives context to the record.

NBN: So then what was the idea behind the album?

Archuleta: It’s kind of an abstract thing to say. I feel like whoever’s listening to it, knowing whatever they do or don’t, can construct their own idea. The idea of it is pretty simple, as in how it’s two different sides of a coin. It’s not a concept record, that’s not what I’m getting at. There’s not a specific thing that it is aiming at. It’s kind of just this mental place that we were in throughout the process while we were making the record, heavily ingrained into everything. The separation of the two sessions we did, the way it’s sequenced like that, you can say that the framework is there, the feeling is there, but there’s no one particular thing that we latched on to while we were making it.

NBN: I’ve heard that your concerts are very different from the albums. What do you do differently live?

Archuleta: The record, a lot of it was a studio construct, and it’s toned down in some ways compared to the show. It’s probably just a little faster, a little louder, and sometimes it’ll get a little crazy depending on what night it is. I figure it’s interesting for the show to be a little different from how the record is.

NBN: Any good concert stories?

Archuleta: One show we played in an art gallery in Atlanta, it was really great and it was really hot and sweaty and packed and they didn’t have air conditioning. We were on the ground, just on the floor at the back of the room. This lady came in, I don’t know if she was homeless or not, this really old-looking lady, a bag lady if you will. She came in and she made her way up front and she stood in the middle of whatever you would call the stage. And she was just standing there, and at one point we were playing and [vocalist] Bradford [Cox] looked over at her and he gave her a guitar and she started playing. He didn’t play guitar for the rest of the song. And then she kind of disappeared after that. I don’t know, people got really excited about that, Bradford was really happy about that happening. I think maybe some people thought we were making fun of her or something, but we weren’t.

NBN: What’s with the album notes? Those aren’t lyrics, right?

Archuleta: No, they’re not lyrics. There might be a fragment here and there, but… I think literally Bradford wrote that down, just free association. He didn’t spend forever writing it or something, he just sat down and wrote it all at once, I think, when we were working on the layout for the record. He writes, to a degree, and so do other people in the band, personally, just for themselves. I guess the best line you can draw between that and something else is like, have you seen Patti Smith’s liner notes? It’s a similar idea to that, where I guess if you were to read it while listening to the album, or before listening to it I guess, it puts you in a kind of space that’s appropriate.

NBN: Do you guys have jobs when you’re not on tour?

Archuleta: Yeah…

NBN: Where?

Archuleta: I’m a backstock manager at a clothing store. Josh is a graphic designer, so is Bradford. Colin works in a diner and Lockett works at [laughs] - Lockett is a security guard-type person at the Titanic exhibit at the history museum.

NBN: Do you think Deerhunter will start paying enough so that you don’t have to work?

Archuleta: We’re trying. We’ve made arrangements so that hopefully when we get back from tour in April we’ll all have our jobs. We’re all busy with the band but I’m not even sure how I feel about the band being this full-time thing and when we’re not on tour we just sit around and don’t do anything. I would have a hard time imagining that, it’s nice to have a balance between things.

NBN: Is the name Deerhunter derived from the movie?

Archuleta: I would have a hard time saying where it’s derived from. Another guy came up with it and it just kind of stuck one day pretty early on. In fact, I don’t think anyone in the band had seen the movie until like a year ago maybe. I figure it came from the movie just because that’s the most popular thing it could be from, but I can’t even say that for certain.

NBN: Every time I try to search for you guys, I always accidentally end up looking at Deerhoof. Common problem?

Archuleta: Yeah, that’s been happening for a while [laughs]. People say it by accident, or misunderstand someone when they’re talking about one thing or another. It just is what it is. It could be worse with the “Wolf” bands I guess.

NBN: Any plans for the next album?

Archuleta: We’re going to tour in April, maybe some more in the summer. Sometime in the summer we’re probably going to start to really write stuff. I mean who can say, seeing how the last record went, but it’s been tossed around that we would maybe start work on it at the end of this year.

NBN: I read that instrumental tracks like “Intro” and “White Ink” on Cryptograms were originally meant to have vocals, like “Cryptograms” does. Is that true?

Archuleta: It’s halfway to the truth. “Intro,” “Cryptograms” and “White Ink” are really, if you see us play it, are more often than not one song, you know, like a suite. We just split them up on the record and each part has a different name. I would knock that part out as one song. [In] “Providence” the main melody that it starts off with was originally taken from another guitar line that was in a different song, and then it was just reworked into that. We thought it works better that way. “Red Ink” was pretty much improvised on the spot. “Tape Hiss Orchid” was improvised too, kind of by accident.

NBN: Were you going for any specific thing with the instrumentals? Were they jammed out or written before?

Archuleta: We didn’t really think that hard about it, it was just kind of our natural inclination at the time. “Cryptograms” was the first song that was written off of it, and the process of how that got written — with the intro into the song and then that kind of drops into the instrumental part after that — I guess you could kind of say that might of started the framework for the album accidentally. A lot of it would go after that, like rise and fall in the same way.

NBN: It seems like there are a lot of locations on the album: Lake Somerset, Hazel Street, Providence. Do they refer to real places?

Archuleta: Yeah, Lake Somerset, it’s real, I’ve never seen it before. It’s close to where Bradford and Lockett grew up. Providence, whatever germ of an idea that came up for that song probably came up when we were on tour and we were kind of working on the album and we were in Providence at the time. Hazel Street, I honestly don’t know.

NBN: You have a new EP, Fluorescent Grey. What’s on it?

Archuleta: Because the Cryptograms process was taking so long, we started writing new stuff just to keep ourselves interested and then when it was all said and done we had these four songs that didn’t really fit into the record. Sometimes when you’re in a band, songs will just disappear for some reason, who knows why. Like “Hazel St.,” it just kind of disappeared for a while and then came back. So when we were mixing the record we just decided to record these four songs and try to do something with them, because maybe if we didn’t then maybe we were going to stop playing them, but we thought they were worth it. We’ll have it when we’re in Chicago, it comes out on the 9th of April, but we’ll have copies for sale at the show.