Warpaint: 7th Chamber

"You've got to… what's the word?" Emily Kokal asks through the phone and I have no idea. She solves her own riddle quickly and blurts out "Compromise!" with self-satisfaction. I should have guessed.

"That should be tattooed on my body," she adds, and then, like she has been asked a follow-up question that never actually came, she furthers "I don't actually need it tattooed, it's in my soul now."

With a sophomore LP for her band Warpaint due in a couple weeks, I admit to her that initial listenings to this self-titled collection were tough, but not difficult in the traditional sense. Warpaint is not an unenjoyable album, nor is it unnecessarily complex, nor is it even uneventful. But, particularly the first few times though, the album holds its secrets securely. And listening to it can feel similar to talking to the band, like being asked a question you don't realize you know the answer to.

Rather than a big payoff, Warpaint's art is most apparent not after the listening experience ends, but when you stop trying to solve its puzzle, as the band reveals exactly what they want to within the music. Still, clues exist. like the album cover, designed by bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg's husband, director Chris Cunningham, director of Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy." The image portrays the four women, Kokal, Lindberg, Theresa Wayman and Stella Mozgawa, as ghostly transparencies, all sharing the same space, so that parts of their physical presence are hard to distinguish from one another's. It's a visual representation of what Kokal says is in her soul—compromise.

"When we first started as a band, the one thing that we were drawn to was that the music felt really fluid and really natural," say Lindberg in a separate phone interview. "We didn't have to have a conversation about where the song would go, it just went there. But as you write more songs, and you really grow up together, that starts to change. You start to have your own opinions and own vision. So now, it is important to be mindful of each other, knowing it isn't just me in the band and it's not just about what I want. It becomes very important to listen to each other, both inside and outside the band. And I think that evolution shows on this record."

Shortly after saying this, Lindberg quotes one of the band's new songs, by describing Warpaint's co-existence in the terms of a song title. "Keep it healthy," she says.

And they do. The band still operates as a friendship, still spends time together as a unit, and even secluded themselves in Joshua Tree for three weeks to devote their full attention to the task of making the album. After all, Warpaint is their first album recorded and written together, as their debut LP, The Fool, was the product of years of refinement. The dynamics of the band, though, remains theirs to keep. Sure, there have been glimpses into the real-life persons, but tidbits like Wayman's coupling with British bass-drop-balladeer James Blake, or Lindberg's Hollywood connection through sister Shannyn Sossamon, a former Warpaint member, all seem like trivial tidbits when placed against their evocative live performances or their smokey aesthetic.

Though guarded in the way that comes with talking to strangers, Kokal's personality comes out in subtle ways. The band has been quoted as noting hip-hop as an influence and while it might not be directly connected to the album in ways the listener can perceive, it isn't hard to believe as Kokal references Wu-Tang Clan when mentioning The Fool's "Bees," or when she refers to The Notorious B.I.G. by his Christian name, Chris Wallace. But never is there a sense of getting to know Kokal or Lindberg, which seems purposeful in how they present their band.

"It's nice that when people think of the band, they think of the music, and not the people making the music," says Lindberg, which is partly true. More accurately, Warpaint comes as a complete package, with the parts hard to discern from the whole. Not that each member isn't recognizable within and outside the music, but the whole is different; it is a stronger entity than any part on its own. Lindberg goes as far to shoot down any importance of having the band be all female, saying "We never really think of ourselves as an all-girl band, and in a lot of ways, we're probably just like a dude."

Kokal isn't as dismissive of this, recalling a recent trip to Russia where she could witness the importance of women playing music with other women, but taking it further than that seems to be just not what the band is about.

Mainstream success is also not what the band is about. The album has no future hit on it, not even much in terms of tracks that one would single out and listen to on repeat, with "Disco // very" and "Love Is to Die" coming closest. And while the final product may represent a symbiotic relationship within the band, Kokal describes the creation as a "battle between four people," before giving the most revealing insights of the conversation.

"By nature, that's a huge part of how we work, battling out idea," Kokal says. "If one person says red, the other person says blue almost to just add to the full spectrum of color that things could be. But you really have to massage it down to something that doesn't lose its potency, but has everyone's color in it. That process is one of the most challenging things and most rewarding parts of being in a band.

"So, a lot of times," she continues, "you come with an idea, and it can be this really singular idea of the way you want things but the whole system of a band is that you collaborate and you let other people into that, and you trust what they do because you like their artistic expression and what they can bring to it. So you come up with something completely different, and maybe the idea that you initially loved, it's not even an outline anymore, and other times you stay really true to the original. It's such a changing process. So an album, and how it comes out, it's not just the songs, it's the collaboration between the four of us and Flood [the producer] and everything that happens that we went through to make this marker in time. It's where you were at that moment and how everything went down. And that, especially if you do it honestly and come from an artistic place, which I feel we do, you can let the music exist and you can put it out and you can let people enjoy it and keep moving. Sometimes that's the hardest part, letting go while making sure the amount of people putting their hands on something doesn't dilute it."

Kokal turns our conversation around at one point and begins asking about the pressures I feel as a writer. Lindberg also mentions the pressure of Joshua Tree, to return with an album's worth of material. And indeed, after talking to them, the pressure of bringing insight to their creation, of illuminating their character, of understanding them as artists that are more than a collection of songs; it all seems insignificant, like trying to answer a rhetorical question. But, the music sounds better every time.

"The thing about our band," Kokal says late in our call, "is that we've never been for everybody, specifically when compared to pop, because we've never really written in that structure. That's never been a priority. But, I also feel that we have found an audience and that the audience feels the music pretty similarly to the way we do. The way that fans have reacted in the past, that has sort of felt like what we are about. The people that need it or want it and feel it, they feel it so much. And likewise, that feels really good."

Not to get too bogged down in the feelings, Kokal adds "So, everybody better like it."

Philip Cosores is a writer living in Los Angeles. He's on Twitter - @Philip_Cosores