“If we’re going to keep touring like this, we need some kind of new story, a new life, something,” Mr. Thompson said over lunch on a weekend day trip to Manhattan from western Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and five children.
Last fall, the band booked a studio in the bucolic Welsh countryside with Gil Norton, who produced three of the Pixies’ five original studio albums. According to the remaining Pixies, Ms. Deal — who clashed with Mr. Thompson in the band’s first incarnation — was present at the start of the sessions but then abruptly announced that she could not continue. Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Deal declined to comment. (She is currently on a reunion tour with her own band, the Breeders.)
“It took us three days to mourn about it,” Mr. Santiago said of Ms. Deal’s departure, and then the men decided to continue without her.
“I hate to say it, but I’m not going to let one snafu get in the way,” he added in a recent interview after a rehearsal in Los Angeles with Mr. Lovering. “It’s time to put on the guitar. It’s time to shine. No one is going to take that away from me.”
To help the band find its sound after so many years, Mr. Norton gave them a riddle. Referring to an old Pixies song, he had them imagine that for all this time they had been off playing on the Planet of Sound, and only now returning to Earth.
The results are less screamy and uptight than the old Pixies. But plenty of their defining obsessions are still there, like the twangy surf guitar and sci-fi surrealism on “Andro Queen.” Mr. Santiago, who in his non-Pixies career has made music for television and film, said that he “scored” his parts to add outer-space atmospherics.
