The best way to get a handle on how Joyce Manor approaches its records is to listen to singer Barry Johnson ruminate on what makes a lasting friendship. Reached at Six Flags Magic Mountain, where he’s attending a birthday party for a member of his social circle, the frontman suggests that, after a while, no one wants to be around someone hopelessly stuck in their ways. The same goes for bands: either you evolve or you stop being interesting.

“If you’ve had a friend for seven or eight years, and they don’t change or grow at all, you are going to start to drift away from them,” Johnson says. “Change is important right across the board—I really look for bands that are interested in pushing themselves to do something new. Every band that I like does that to some degree. I don’t think that means that, because you’ve done a punk record, you should then go and do a jazz record next. I’m looking more for subtle things that are different—bands that grow a little bit with each album.”

The singer might as well be describing Joyce Manor, which includes guitarist Chase Knobbe, drummer Kurt Walcher, and bassist Matt Ebert. The Torrance, California, quartet got labelled a pop-punk great white hope with its eponymous 2011 debut, confused everyone with an unexpectedly adventurous sophomore effort titled Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired, and has pulled another U-turn with the just-released Never Hungover Again.

Once again, the band has a knack for hooks that would impress no less than Rivers Cuomo, as evidenced by the sticks-on-first-listen broken-bottle pop of “Victoria”. But rather than adhere to one style, Joyce Manor veers all over the map, from the classic British Invasion stylings of “Schley” to the ’80s-vintage dark-waver “Falling in Love Again”. There’s also a brooding darkness to short-but-sweet standouts like “Christmas Card” and “Heart Tattoo.”

So despite having a title that sounds like it might have come from the house of NOFX, Never Hungover Again has more in common with the works of cerebral punk bands like Brand New.

“The weird part of it all was that it wasn’t, like, a big decision to do something different,” Johnson says of Never Hungover Again. “It was more like a conscious decision to stay excited about the band and the songs that we were writing. When you are writing songs that sound like something that you have already done before, only before they were better, it becomes more interesting to go off in a direction that still sounds like your band, only different. It’s more like trial and error, like ‘How does this feel to play?’ And when you finally come up with something that everyone is excited about, it always happens to sound like something new.”

It was an iconic act from the distant past that convinced Johnson to aspire to something more than a deal with Fat Wreck Chords.

“The big band for me was the Beach Boys,” the singer says. “I tried getting into them over and over again, because I knew that the Ramones and a lot of bands that I liked were really influenced by them. They never did anything for me. But then suddenly they got their hooks into me, and that opened up a lot of doors. Suddenly, I was able to appreciate a lot of other stuff.”

That probably includes his own band, which has not only confused (and delighted) fans with the turns it’s taken with each record but has ultimately discovered there are rewards for changing things up, challenging as all that might be.

“I was worried about being able to pull this record off live,” Johnson says. “Even though we’re not exactly insanely good musicians, things sound even better when we play them than they did in the studio.”

Joyce Manor opens for Brand New at the Vogue on Monday (September 1).