Deerhunter’s Moses Archuleta plays the drums like a girl.

“Some of my favourite drummers ever are women,” says the Atlanta-based indie rocker, reached at home. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Mo Tucker [from the Velvet Underground] or Ingrid Weiss from the Raincoats, but I often find that women have a really interesting way of playing, a way that’s really persistent but at the same time totally unpredictable. That’s kind of what I strive for.”

Archuleta’s functional-but-quirky style provides a necessary counterbalance to Deerhunter’s esoteric wanderings, tethering the band amidst a tempest of six-string feedback and front man Bradford Cox’s self-abasing theatrics. The quartet’s excellent new album, Microcastle, is its most contained effort to date, channeling the squalling textures of last year’s Cryptograms into something like a conventional pop context. In this environment, Archuleta stands out by not trying to stand out at all.

“You could probably say that the way people play their instruments is reflective of their personalities,” says the low-key drummer, who also acts as the band’s manager. “I tend to like things to be uncluttered. I’ve always been wary of cluttering songs with a bunch of needless fills. With a band like ours, there’s a lot of layering of sounds going on. If the drums were played that way too, there’d be a danger of it all becoming a bit aimless.”

On that count, Archuleta found an ally in engineer Nicolas Vernhes, who recorded the Microcastle sessions at his Rare Book Room studio in Brooklyn. Less a producer than a keen editor, Vernhes helped rein in the band’s extravagant tendencies.

“He’s really good at cutting out excess,” says Archuleta. “Whenever things would get too lofty or ambitious, he knew when to get us to pull back. A lot of times in the studio our instinct is just to keep piling things on, so it really helps having that opinion outside the band that everyone can trust.”

The consensus formed in Brooklyn is tangible throughout the recording, which balances the band’s fixation with My Bloody Valentine on one hand and the Everly Brothers on the other. The final result pairs nicely with Caribou’s Andorra, another recent record that updates Zombies-like psych-pop for the MySpace nation.

If Microcastle sounds like a proper pop album, says Archuleta, that’s down to a temporary change in Deerhunter’s working methods. Where once they’d spend weeks and months working out songs from scratch, the bandmates have adopted a demo-based approach, meeting up to develop material that one of them, usually Cox, has already written.

“The gestation and recording period for Cryptograms was two years, but for Microcastle it was just a few months,” the drummer explains. “There might be people that hear the new album and assume that we’re getting more concise and more concerned with pop songs. They might see that as a sign of how we’re going to sound in the future. But there’s really no telling how our next album will sound. That’s what I like about our music—it’s like a document of what we’re thinking at the time, and of the circumstances we happen to find ourselves in.”

Deerhunter plays Richard’s on Richards tonight (November 20).