The song that opens the latest múm album bears a passing resemblance, if only lyrically, to a certain Bobby Darin hit from 1966. “If I were a fish/And you were a seashell,” it begins, over what sounds like prepared piano and hammered dulcimer. “Would you marry me anyway?/Would you have my babies?” “If I Were a Fish” lifts a few words from “If I Were a Carpenter”, but it’s only the most obvious example of múm’s weaving borrowed bits of pop culture into its songs. By recontextualizing snippets of older compositions, the Icelandic collective makes the familiar unfamiliar. As “Prophecies and Reversed Memories” suggests, “You’ve sang [sic] this song before”¦it was just a little different, that’s all.” In that context, the album’s title, Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, would seem to make perfect sense.

Then again, maybe that’s reading too much into things. Reached at a Washington, D.C., tour stop, múm’s í–rvar ížóreyjarson Smárason claims the long-running band had no such overarching theme in mind.

“When we create music, we let what comes in and goes out just really do its own thing,” he says. “We never actually have any special thing that we are trying to do. We let it all go pretty easily. So if some songs like that influence it, I think it’s a really, really natural thing. This is the same answer I would give you if you had asked me if waterfalls or glaciers and landscape stuff had influenced our music. I don’t really know how this all works. And I think it’s what keeps our music to be healthy, that we just let things go.”

So where did the record’s title come from? “I was sitting in a family reunion and people started sitting around in a circle,” Smárason recalls. “They were singing a song, and I was sure I had heard it sometime before, but it was really unfamiliar to me. And I just wanted to start singing, singing anything along to it. I got really sad after the song had finished, because I didn’t just join in and make my own thing out of it.”

His relatives were likely harmonizing on “Komdu inn í­ kofann minn”, a popular Icelandic number based on a melody by Hungarian composer Emmerich Kálmán. Smárason won’t say, but he does reveal “There’s a bit of it on the album. It’s hidden there somewhere, but I won’t tell you where.”

In fact, there are all sorts of hidden treasures on Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, almost-buried elements that reveal themselves only on close listening. Most of these are incidental sounds, like the creaking of a piano bench or the faint chirping of the parakeet belonging to Smárason’s parents. Múm, a revolving-door collective based around the core duo of Smárason and Gunnar í–rn Tynes, tends to record in living rooms and basements, giving its productions a homemade feel. That, combined with the acoustic instrumentation that dominates Sing Along—ukulele, piano, cello, violin—might lead some to categorize this as a folk record, but Smárason firmly disagrees.

“No, I definitely would never call it a folk album,” he says. “Folk to me means something completely different. Folk music is music that gets passed between generations. It’s music of the people. Folk to me isn’t just music played on folk guitars.

“We’re not traditional,” he continues. “This is pop music. It may be weird pop music, but it’s definitely pop music.”

Múm plays Venue on Monday (November 2).