Keeping busy isn’t a problem for multitasking guitarist Matt Mondanile, who, when tracked down at a friend’s place in New Jersey, has just arrived back in the States after a quick European promo tour with Real Estate. Before London, Amsterdam, and Paris stops to showcase the band’s excellent new album, Atlas, there was a brief swing through Australia with Ducktails, his solo project turned band that he’s used as a creative outlet since 2006.

As if that’s not enough, when not on the road with those endeavours, Mondanile busies himself with his own record label, New Images, which has issued releases by Vancouver jangle-pop greats the Shilohs, Cleveland ambient alchemist Mark McGuire, and Finnish soundscape specialist Tsembla. The upshot of all this is that downtime is hard to come by.

An empty calendar is something that Mondanile doesn’t get to enjoy often. Not that he’s complaining as Real Estate gets ready to launch a touring cycle that will have it playing 1,000-seat rooms, a good indicator of the band’s growing status in the indie trenches.

“I don’t like to think of touring as a horrible thing anymore because I’ve done it so much,” the guitarist says. “It’s only a horrible thing when you’re on tour for three weeks straight and with the same guys and you’re all in dirty clothes, and nobody wants to hang out with each other, and you’re tired and stuff. But that doesn’t happen very often. It’s a hard mentality to sort of get into because you have to compromise and do what the group wants to do. But the only thing I’m thinking about right now is what clothes I need to bring and how much stuff I need to pack.”

The packing comes as Real Estate is about to spring Atlas on the world. An early contender for the year’s top-10 lists, the disc—perhaps fittingly—seems tangentially concerned with the trials and tribulations of sitting in the back of a tour van, knowing full well everything is in a constant state of change at home. (Consider the lyrics “Don’t know if I can go back/But to live out this dream” from the deliciously laconic “Had to Hear”, or “This is not the same place I used to know” from “Past Lives”.)

On the musical side of things, Real Estate—which also includes singer-guitarist Martin Courtney, bassist Alex Bleeker, drummer Jackson Pollis, and keyboardist Matt Kallman—made a valiant attempt to branch out from its eponymous 2009 debut and the 2011 follow-up, Days. Critics gushingly suggested that both those albums were meant as soundtracks for days more impossibly golden than a ’70s-saturated Kodachrome photo.

“On the two other records that we have, people always say that we sound really summery and beachy and shit,” Mondanile says. “We were trying not to do that so much with this record, to have a couple of different moods and elements.”

With that goal in mind, the group decamped to a loft studio in Chicago owned by Wilco, making full use of equipment made available by the Windy City act and, more importantly, concentrating on laying down the songs live.

“It was really relaxing because it was like being in a studio, but it was also more like being in a loft where people lived where you had couches and stuff,” Mondanile relates. “It has personality—it wasn’t just like a cold studio.”

That seems to have seeped into Atlas, a record that doesn’t lack sun-baked gold like “The Bend” and “Primitive”, but also shows Real Estate as a band that’s not sitting under any one umbrella. Prepare to fall in love with the dream-hazed soft-country rambler “Talking Backwards” and the double-honeyed Velvets shimmer of “How Might I Live”.

Having just helped create a classic, and the demands that go along with it, Mondanile has ensured that life—busy as it already is—isn’t about to slow down anytime soon.