Sometimes the promise of moving forward from an artistic standpoint trumps the chance to work with a genuine legend. That explains how Girlpool ended up crafting its stellar sophomore album, Powerplant, in Los Angeles rather than the Chicago hometown of Jeff Tweedy. Being a fan, the Wilco frontman offered to handle the album’s production duties for the team of guitarist-singer Cleo Tucker and bassist-singer Harmony Tividad. But when a scheduling conflict led the two bandmates and best friends to Los Angeles, they discovered they were onto something that wrote a new chapter in the Girlpool story.

“We were going to record with Jeff, which would have been so exciting and cool,” Tucker says, on cellphone from New York, where Girlpool is on a press swing. “We love him and his work a lot. But we also wanted to expand the instrumentation on our record, and I was recording drum parts while we were making demos. I wrote drum parts for the album, and then wanted someone who could play them quickly and well and had experience recording drums. We also wanted to make the record really fast. It had been a long time since we’d put any music out.”

The drums—played on Powerplant by Miles Wintner—were important for reasons that anyone familiar with Girlpool’s past work will understand. The group’s debut EP and Top 10–quality debut album, Before the World Was Big, found Tividad and Tucker taking an unorthodox approach to lo-fi indie rock, their songs built around only bass, guitar, and vocals. What could’ve come on as a novelty instead came across as original.

The gamble with Powerplant was that fans would want more of what first attracted them to Girlpool, the addition of drums on some level changing the group’s whole aesthetic.

“For me I think it was a little scary,” Tividad says by phone. “I’ve always felt really comfortable working with Cleo and sharing our work together. But there’s also always been this feeling of ‘The project can be whatever we need it to be. It’s ours, and we can move it any direction we want to.’ So I guess there was no fear because we knew we could always continue to be minimal. Or continue to be extravagant and lush.”

Both those descriptions work for Powerplant. As on past outings, the duo strips slacker pop down to a lo-fi skeleton on standouts like “Sleepless” and “Soup”. There’s newfound urgency to the band’s attack, with “Corner Store” unleashing some truly epic guitar violence. There’s also a newfound willingness to go beyond lo-fi, with “123” leaning heavily on thumping percussion and wall-of-sound guitars.

What might please Tucker and Tividad most, though, is that they were allowed to make the record they wanted to. Partial credit for that goes to their label Anti-, the artist-first imprint that’s home to Neko Case, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

“We can’t work any other way than being completely in control,” Tividad says. “We have always been curious about what kind of people try and take control of someone’s art. With Anti- no one has tried to interfere with what we do. That’s interesting in this time of media saturation. Things like branding have really taken us to a new place where everyone wants to be the coolest person or the most attractive. A lot of honesty and truth gets lost in that competition. So we are lucky we just get to be us.”

Girlpool plays the Biltmore on Saturday (May 27).