When the  Straight catches up with Dustin Payseur somewhere on a stretch of blacktop connecting New Mexico and Arizona, the Beach Fossils frontman couldn’t be happier with where he finds himself. Well, not the American Southwest specifically, but on the road with his bandmates. Since he started it as a home-recording project in 2009, Payseur has seen more than a dozen musicians come and go from the live incarnation of Beach Fossils. The singer-guitarist says that the current version—which includes his in-studio partner Tommy Gardner on drums, with Jack Doyle Smith on bass and Tommy Davidson on guitar—is a keeper.

“This lineup feels pretty solid,” Payseur asserts. “We’re really good friends. This is definitely the tightest I’ve ever felt with bandmates. We’re extremely close. And even when we’re back in New York and we’re not on tour, we still hang out on a pretty regular basis. I guess after just having so many different members in the band I got to a point where it was a huge priority to me to just have somebody that I could spend months on end in a van with and know that I wouldn’t get sick of them.”

For the recording of Beach Fossils’ sophomore album, Clash the Truth, however, it was just Payseur and Gardner in the studio with producer Ben Greenberg. That the LP was made somewhere other than Payseur’s home, and with people other than himself contributing, is a major difference between it and Beach Fossils’ self-titled 2010 debut. While Clash the Truth retains much of the dream-hazed indie-pop sensibility of that first effort, it is nowhere near as twee. Payseur and Gardner crank the energy up considerably for the shoegazing “In Vertigo”, with its wall of white-squall guitars and crashing-waves beats, and for the full-throttle surf-punk of “Careless”.

Payseur credits the record’s live-wire intensity to the fact that he and Gardner tracked the bass and drums live in the studio after only one day of rehearsing the songs together. He says the result comes closer to capturing the group’s on-stage energy than Beach Fossils did.

“From the previous years of touring I had an idea in mind of how I wanted it to sound, because we sound very different live than we do on the record,” he notes. “Even with these new songs we sound different live than on the record. It’s more energetic, and it’s faster and hits harder. You know, I kind of wish I could go back and do the record even harder, but I guess you’ve got to just look to the future.”

And does the future hold the possibility of Doyle Smith and Davidson joining Payseur and Gardner in the recording studio? According to Payseur, the answer is definitely maybe.

“I’d like to try everything,” he says. “I still sit at home and record stuff by myself, but I’m also really interested in the idea of getting together with everybody and just seeing what happens, because I haven’t tried that yet, and I think this is a lineup that that would really work for. You know, when you’re by yourself you start to fall into this trap of repetition where you get too comfortable with your own style and it’s too easy for you to make the same thing. So if you’re with somebody else, it’s like, ‘Oh, damn, I like that guitar line. There’s no way I would have made that chord progression myself.’ ”