Liam Maloney

A Sable Relationship | Husband aDan Boeckner and wife Alexei Perry are Handsome Furs.

Let’s clarify something right off the top: Handsome Furs are not a side project. While it’s true Dan Boeckner is also a member of indie darlings Wolf Parade, he and wife Alexei Perry are confused by the term. And can you blame them? With the release of their new album Face Control, they have now put out as many records as Boeckner’s other band (if you want to get technical about it).

“It’s a weird thing,” Perry explains over the phone from their home in Montreal. “I think that term ‘side project’ is used almost exclusively in music. I’ve never really understood that. It’s only because someone has some notoriety for something else. If you’re an artist and you work in two different mediums — say, painting and sculpture — no one calls one a side project. You do different things; you have different outlets to exercise different parts of your brain.”

To be sure, not only do the songs on Face Control sound distinct from Boeckner’s work with Wolf Parade, but they’re also more aggressive than the ones on the duo’s 2007 debut album Plague Park. Perry attributes the change in tempo to the pair’s experience touring eastern Europe.

“We wanted to have songs that were sort of more raw and intense because we liked being able to perform that way live,” she says. “We want to make people dance at our shows. Plague Park was [written] in our home and we had the songs pretty much done by the time we were recording them. [With] Face Control, we took a more journalistic approach where we were taking snippets of things that we had been experiencing on our travels, whether it was photos or things we’d recorded or lyrics for songs, and then took them into the studio and tried to record things live off the floor. We wanted to keep a good sense of the urgency and immediacy of what we were working on.”

As you listen to Boeckner’s distorted guitar riffs paired with Perry’s somber yet jolting keyboards, the influence of the pair’s eastern exploits is hard to miss. Listening to Perry talk about their travels makes it clear just how much impact it had.

“Some of the stuff we were doing on this record, we were just trying to recreate sounds we’d heard in different places,” she says. “We took an overnight train from Helsinki to Moscow; it was a really bleak and weird thing to do. We started doing a lot of writing on that train ride and wanted to somehow make evidence of what we were working on sonically.”

An absorbing sense of alienation makes its presence felt on Face Control, but there is promise in lyrics pleading for a change of scenery — or any kind of change, for that matter.

“I think a lot of the time you come from a position where you’re not wholly satisfied where you are,” says Perry. “You’re frequently yearning for something else. I think we try to be as hopeful as possible but we’re not totally satisfied with the world we live in.”

Face Control (Sub Pop) is in stores now.