When Dee Dee Penny picks up the phone in New York, she readily cops to being in the middle of a Sisyphean job.

“I’m in my very messy bedroom,” says the artist known to her other half as Kristin Welchez. “There are clothes everywhere because I’ve been reorganizing my closet. I stopped midway, so it all looks really chaotic. My husband [Crocodiles singer Brandon Welchez] was in Japan for a couple of days, so I was trying to use that time to do it, but I was just too tired to finish. Then he got back. We have a little recording studio in the bedroom, and he’s been working every day, which has meant I haven’t had the time to pick things back up. The closet looks great, but that’s because there’s nothing in it. It’s all on the floor.”

Metaphorically speaking, cleaning out her closet is nothing new for the singer-guitarist and public face of the NYC–based quartet known as Dum Dum Girls. Flash back a few years, and Penny exorcised some ghosts with the band’s excellent 2011 outing, Only in Dreams. That record was a personal one, many of the songs inspired by her mother’s battle with—and death from—cancer.

Penny acknowledges that the writing on Only in Dreams put her through an emotional wringer, the stress compounded by the fact she’d rather keep her personal life as private as possible. When it came time to begin work on Dum Dum Girls’ recently released third album, Too True, the singer decided to change things up some.

Sonically, the record makes noticeable diversions from the dreamy surf-pop template the group has favoured to date. Penny rediscovered her love for iconic goth alchemists the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, which gave Too True a decidedly black-hearted vibe. With its pneumatic beats and Arabic guitar, the opening track, “Cult of Love”, conjures up the Luv-A-Fair circa 1984. “Too True to Be Good” is soaked with synths that are prettier than pink, while “Trouble Is My Name” takes an ambient detour through the fog-shrouded streets of Bristol.

Lyrically, it’s harder to figure out what’s on Penny’s mind this time out, the singer cautiously allowing that it was a relief not to be wallowing in the darkness.

“Only in Dreams was very much bookmarked by a specific period of my life,” she reports. “It was a very intense, traumatic period, and that record is probably the only significant grieving process that I went through. I did not deal with that in a healthy way, and it had a lot of repercussions on the rest of my life. It wasn’t until three years later that I started to feel like I could move past the sort of all-consuming, overwhelming baggage that was a result of what I experienced.

“So for me,” Penny continues, “coming out on the other side of that process, I finally felt free to where I didn’t have to write about those kind of things. I felt very much open to whatever felt like it was inspiring me. I was very, very happy to get to a place where the world felt open again, instead of everything seeming very contained. So a big, although maybe not completely overt, theme of this record is an acknowledgment of a self-acceptance, of a self-awareness. Of a new understanding that from a lot of missteps can come personal growth. At some point you have to stop living with personal ghosts and move forward.”

Her closet, it would seem, is cleaned out in more ways than one.

Dum Dum Girls play the Biltmore Cabaret on Friday (April 4).