No one could ever accuse A Sunny Day in Glasgow of lacking ambition. The Philadelphia-based band's most recent album has 24 tracks on it. Sure, some of them are as short as 11 or 43 seconds, but when you consider that Ashes Grammar clocks in at just over 63 minutes, it's still a monumental achievement. Even so, the band's guitarist and main songwriter, Ben Daniels, says that if he and the album's producer, ASDIG guitarist-keyboardist Josh Meakim, hadn't reined it in, the album might have turned into a never-ending project.

“We had tons and tons of songs, actually, that we started,” Daniels says, reached at the band's rehearsal space. “We'd still be recording it now if we kept going for all these songs. So we kind of saw where we were at with them and we said ”˜We're not going to worry about that one. We'll come back to that. These other ones are further along.' And we just stopped working on a bunch, because we were going to go crazy. And it's very good that we did that, because it still took another four months from that point.”

When Ashes Grammar was finally complete, it was released by Mis Ojos Discos last September to universal acclaim, its pastel-hued layers of reverb-saturated vocals, sunburst-and–snow-blind ambient haze, and lo-fi dance beats garnering comparisons to the 4AD and Creation Records back catalogues. Mind you, Daniels makes it clear he has little use for any of that, pointedly dismissing the likes of Lush and Slowdive in conversation with the Straight. It's telling, too, that he coyly avoids using the term “dream pop”, preferring to describe A Sunny Day in Glasgow as merely “dreamy pop”—not that he spends a lot of time worrying about making his music fit into any particular genre.

“I don't know that I think about it that much, to tell you the truth,” Daniels says. “I think when I generally write songs, it's kind of like a pop format, I guess you'd say. I mean, on Ashes Grammar, there's a bunch of really long songs, but generally when I start they're like three or four minutes and there's maybe a verse part and a chorus part or something. And that's maybe how it would be at the beginning”¦.There's not always so much of a firm concept or plan when it gets going. You do stuff and you react to stuff, and eventually you figure out what works and what doesn't, and you end up with, hopefully, something good.”

Well, it's working out so far—even if the end result is a lot closer to classic dream pop than Daniels would ever admit.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow plays the Media Club on Monday (March 8).