If Matt & Kim’s Grand proves anything, it’s this: not only can you take the hipsters out of Williamsburg, you can sometimes take Williamsburg out of the hipsters. Consider that a warning that the perma-peppy synth-pop duo’s sophomore release aims higher than Brooklyn kitchen parties where Pabst Blue Ribbon is the beer of choice and Lucky Strike is the only brand worth risking lung cancer for.

As the triple-time new-waver “Cinders” proves, singer-keyboardist Matt Johnson and drummer Kim Schifino haven’t completely turned their backs on the Saturday-night crowd at Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern. This time out, though, you’ll hear snake-charming melodica, movie-soundtrack string swells, and Beirut-flavoured brass flourishes. “Daylight” works a brewed-in-Bristol trip-hop backbeat, “Cutdown” shows those obnoxious scenesters from Death From Above 1979 a thing or two about prog-punk, and “Lessons Learned” offers up a fuzz-buzzed version of new-millennium techno.

By experimenting with instruments they had no idea how to play three years ago, Matt & Kim have officially served notice that they’d rather hang out with Black Dice and TV on the Radio than compete with cheap imitators like the Ting Tings. For that, Johnson credits a change in the duo’s mindset. When it was time to begin recording the follow-up to 2006’s blogosphere-blessed breakthrough, Matt & Kim, the de facto frontman and his drummer girlfriend went looking for a setting that wasn’t exactly bright lights, big city. They found it in the Vermont family farmhouse where Johnson grew up. It was there, in a makeshift studio, that Grand would slowly begin to take shape.

“We did it by ourselves in the middle of nowhere with nothing but cow pastures around us,” Johnson says, on his cellphone somewhere on a highway in New York state, following a Montreal show. “Our last recording experience was very different. That was nine days to record the whole album. We’d be like, ”˜Okay, close enough, let’s move on.’ This was more trying stuff, going, ”˜Doesn’t work—let’s move to the next song.’ We basically did whatever the fuck we wanted to do. We really gave it the shot.”

Freed from distractions, and working from a gold mine of Dictaphone snippets recorded during the never-ending touring for Matt & Kim, Johnson and Schifino spent the better part of a year on Grand, the sessions interrupted by occasional live dates and festival appearances. Pretty quickly, they discovered there was an upside to spending much of 2006 and 2007 on the road, where their notoriously infectious two-person new-wave dance party made them a must-see live act. Not only did Johnson and Schifino become better musicians in the wake of Matt & Kim, but they also found themselves better songwriters. The challenge was to balance the 2,000-watt energy of their live shows with their newfound musical proficiency.

“Hearing a song while you’re out dancing and sweating and it’s 2 in the morning and you’re possibly drunk is very different than listening to something in your car when you’re driving at 8:30 in the morning and focused,” Johnson notes. “Especially these days, when everything is so produced that we’re just not used to hearing mistakes. Everything that’s human gets pulled. We wanted to go as far as we could, keeping Grand as human as we could, but still making it acceptable to as many people as possible.”

The musicians discovered that the process didn’t come without its challenges. As Axl Rose learned with Chinese Democracy, there’s a downside to having an unlimited amount of time to tinker in the studio.

“The difficult thing is to know when to stop,” Johnson notes. “When you have ultimate freedom and no time frame other than what you’ve given yourself, it’s easy to go way too far. To make everything cluttered and lose the beat and melody in a wash of too much. That’s the hardest part. But from square one of this band, it was never meant to be just two instruments.”

What hasn’t changed, though, is Johnson and Schifino’s conviction that they’ve lucked into the best job in the world. The two became a hot-list act in Williamsburg on the back of a live show that’s among the most joyous in pop music, underground or otherwise. Even if they’ve grown up musically on Grand, they’re still hitting the stage looking like they’ve just won El Gordo in the Spanish Christmas Lottery. Three years into a career where piling into the tour van typically loses a little lustre with each passing month, Johnson is happy to report that the famously mile-wide grin Schifino sports on-stage is still every bit as genuine as it was back in the Bedford Avenue loft-party years.

“Way more often than not, we’re having a total blast,” he reports. “Not to say there haven’t been nights where everything is a total disaster. But even though some people think we’re putting on an act of enjoyment, my total policy is 100 percent that, if we’re having fun, we’re going to show it.

“Even when we’re having a bad day,” he continues, “a lot of times all I have to do is think that I get to play music for a living, and it breaks me right out of that mood. I think it’s important to show physically the kind of time that you’re having, and lucky for us, for the most part, we’re usually totally psyched to play.”

Matt & Kim play the Biltmore Cabaret on Wednesday (January 28).