The most striking thing about the Concretes fourth and latest album, WYWH, is the way the Swedish collective manages to sound both inescapably bummed out and thrilled about life. Reached at her mom’s house in Stockholm, the band’s thoughtful singer Lisa Milberg acknowledges that she’s more than aware of this dichotomy, mostly because it’s an accurate representation of who she is as a person.

“With my songwriting there’s always a kind of sadness there,” the singer says in lightly accented English. “I know this because my mom once said that she would give me a thousand dollars if I wrote a happy song. I can’t seem to, though. Obviously, it [my songwriting] is a reflection of what I’m like—maybe I think too much about things. But everything that I like, whether it’s art or music or books or TV, I like them to not be very sad or very happy. I tend to like things best when they are more somewhere in between.”

In other words, even though Milberg is, at her core, the kind of person who’s only happy when it rains, her idea of a perfect day isn’t watching Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves alone in bed in the dark.

“I like the kind of happy and sad place, not just in art, but in life in general,” she continues. “It feels to me like the only place that makes sense. It’s the only place where you can reflect truly on what life is like. I mean I don’t think that I’m ever truly happy, and I’m never truly sad. It’s always a mix. Take Breaking the Waves, for example—that’s something that, to me, makes very little sense because it’s so incredibly sad.”

WYWH could have easily ended up a mammoth downer considering the way the last few years have unfolded for the Concretes. After the departure of original singer Victoria Bergsman, the band’s last album, 2007’s Hey Trouble, found Milberg leaving the drum kit to assume vocal duties. As proud as she is of the record today, Milberg admits that the transition was anything but enjoyable. She was nervous about filling Bergsman’s shoes, that task not made any easier by the fact that four out of five Hey Trouble reviews spent as much time dwelling on the lineup shift as they did on the music.

By the end of the album’s touring cycle everyone in the group had had enough, to the point where WYWH would end up being a years in the making. Part of that time was spent figuring out if the Concretes even wanted to be in a band.

“We did Hey Trouble for the right reasons—for our friendship,” Milberg says. “We wanted to make sure that we still kind of had something as a band. But it was a very difficult time. And afterwards, I had no idea what I had got myself into. I ended up being exhausted and terrified to the point where, after the record and touring, I needed some time to figure things out.

“We didn’t talk about needing a break, and actually tried to ignore it as long as possible. But every time we attempted to write new songs after Hey Trouble, it didn’t feel right. We’d try a few new songs, and then just each go back to our own corners of the world. Or we’d say we’d finish songs and send them to all members of the band, and then we wouldn’t. And then we just stopped trying, which was the best thing we could have done. The pressure was all too much.”

“Good Evening”, the first track on WYWH, would turn things around for the Concretes. Milberg pinpoints the song—a downbeat pysch-country meditation flared with desert-canyon guitars—and as the one where she knew that the band was back. And, more so, in the mood to do something different. Where the Concretes first got noticed for an organic brand of chamber pop, WYWH spirals off in all sorts of new directions. With its doom-laden drum ’n’ bass groove, “Crack in the Paint” reinvents trip-hop for the indie set, while “What We’ve Become” boils postpunk down to spartan basics with impressive results.

Elsewhere, the Concretes sound as happy to be firing up the disco afterburners for “WYWH” as they are going the ethereal lo-fi route on the gorgeous, organ-soaked “Sing for Me.”

Things are ultimately peachy enough in Concretes land these days that, talking to Milberg, you can’t help but get the feeling that, for once, the sun is winning out over the black clouds.

“It’s all intense at the moment, which is good and bad,” she says. “I guess that’s the definition of intense. I do know that we wanted to make an album that was fun to play live. And that’s something that I think we managed to do.”

The Concretes play the Biltmore Cabaret on Tuesday (March 1).