Most Lanterns on the Lake songs roll over you like massive, slow-moving tidal waves. Take "I'll Stall Them," an atmospheric highlight from the Newcastle band's third LP: Hazel Wilde's delicate voice crests over piano drone and tumbling drums, as muted brass stretches the epic to a mighty crescendo. "Give me a good day / I want to feel human" Hazel Wilde croons, ironing home the album's crucial theme: "I suppose it's just this desire to connect and find meaning that most of us carry around every day," Wilde says. Myspace chatted with the singer about the band's ethereal third album, Beings.

Hometown / Homebase: Newcastle-upon-tyne, United Kingdom

The band worked on Beings in the isolated environment of your rehearsal space. Could you describe that atmosphere and what it brought out of the music?

We started writing it when we'd returned from a long tour of Europe and North America. I think we were pretty tired, and we were going through all kinds of emotions for various reasons after that tour. The rehearsal room was a kind of sanctuary at that point, and we ended up beginning what turned out to be Beings. It's hard to put my finger on what it was that brought out the music. I guess it was a release in some ways. In other ways, I suppose it was a comfort to be working on something at that point.

You began writing the album in February 2014. How long did it take you to fully flesh out the songs?

Some of the songs didn't take too long – they were pretty much written in their full form within the time it takes to play them a couple of times. Others took much, much longer. Altogether I think we were writing over the course of a few months.

Could you describe your creative process in terms of structure? Do you typically write enough material for an album and then stop? Do you record as you write? Do you write more than you need then pick what's best?

We start out with a handful of ideas, and usually during the process of working on those ideas, we'll hit a stride and more and more songs will pop out. We'll demo songs, tweak them, rework them, dump them, and rediscover them. We'll keep going until we feel that there's a record in there somewhere. With this album, I think we had about 20 tracks altogether – some more vague and loose than others. Naturally, some songs stand out as stronger than others, and you find that there's a collection of them that hold well together – narratively and in style and feeling. With this record, there were a few songs which we felt were some of our strongest yet, but they just didn't sit well with the others on the record, so they weren't included.

You've said you wanted Beings to be more "raw" than your previous work, but in what sense? The production certainly isn't raw, and the songs are definitely lush and layered. Do you mean raw in an emotional sense?

In how we recorded them, performed them and the overall feel of the record.

"Of Dust & Matter" really establishes this heady, exploratory, and often grim mood that carries throughout the album. There are ominous piano chords, eerie guitar textures, those glitchy, falling-down-the-stairs drums. It's really the emotional centerpiece of the album.

"Of Dust & Matter" was one of the songs that took a little longer to do. I think that was one of the first ideas that I brought to the band early on in the writing process, but we couldn't really work out where to go with it. I had the basic structure with the piano, lyrics and melody, but we couldn't quite find the right way to execute it as a band. I think we all had different ideas about which direction it could go, and we ended up giving up on it. Eventually, about three months later, we came back to it, and it somehow clicked into place – we added the foot stomps and the glitchy drums and that guitar line, which I love. It all came to life. That sometimes happens. It's not that we are desperately precious about making things perfect; it's just that a song has to have that magic "thing," which can sometimes take awhile to reach.

That song also features the line "walking in a world of plastic souls," which seems like a reflection on being surrounded by the fake intimacy of modern life – of smart-phones and apps and this emptiness that we try to fill with technology.

Yeah, it is a feeling of detachment in a shallow society.

Even though Lanterns make music perfect for headphones, its vastness really seems like it would pay off in a deeper way on-stage. Have you ever had a "spiritual" moment – not necessarily in the religious sense – while playing live?

I don't want to sound like a hippie or anything, but of course there are some really magic moments when you are playing live – it is one of the few things "of the moment." Most things in this life are about the end result – painting is about the finished picture; sport is about the final score – but with playing live, it's about being in that moment rather than the last note that's played. There's something about the nerves, adrenaline, emotion, feeling connected to the audience and to the songs. It doesn't happen at every gig, but when it does, you are reminded of why you spent nine hours in a van feeling fed up.

The band has built a strong following at this point, but you're far from a household name. Many musicians struggle their whole lives with the idea of building a career or "making it." Some musicians have an invisible line they want to cross – playing some huge venue, selling a certain number of albums. Do Lanterns have a goal like that?

I don't think we have such a quantifiable goal in that sense. We have worked hard writing, recording, touring, and making Lanterns On the Lake a special band to people and to ourselves. We want to have a body of work that we feel proud of. It feels like we slowly and gradually get more people onboard. It's difficult for an indie band like us without the big money and TV exposure to get that, so our following has had a slower and more organic growth.