On Death Cab for Cutie’s Plans album from 2005, frontman Ben Gibbard sang tenderly about seeing everything “from Bangkok to Calgary” during the wistful “I Will Follow You Into the Dark”. Beautiful allusion aside, this hasn’t been the case for the band, which is still discovering new things on its worldwide exploits. A recent tour in Southeast Asia, for instance, found the group falling for the ages-old majesty of Batu Caves near Kuala Lumpur and, judging by bassist Nicholas Harmer’s Instagram account, some ever-present, fur-covered locals.

“When we first got there it was like, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s monkeys! This is incredible! I’ve never seen monkeys running around!’ And by the end of it, we were like, ‘This place is lousy with monkeys,’ ” Harmer says with a laugh while recalling the trip over the phone from his home in Seattle. “They’re sneaky. They run up, and you’ll be standing there with your water bottle, and they’ll yank it out of your hand. They go very quickly from something adorable to a nuisance.”

Death Cab for Cutie is having fun on the road even when not sightseeing. That the group is riding this high may be surprising, considering its latest album, Kintsugi, was made under some fairly depressing circumstances. For one, much of the full-length hints at the dissolution of Gibbard’s marriage to singer-actor Zooey Deschanel.

Whether in the whisky-soaked, relationship-eclipsing “Black Sun”, or when the singer returns “to the scenes of these crimes” on the anthemic “The Ghosts of Beverly Drive”, the subject matter is pretty bleak. Harmer would argue that it’s just honest.

“One thing I’ve always been proud of him [Gibbard] for, and something that I’ve always been inspired by, is that he’s always tried to write about subjects, events, feelings, and emotions that are happening to him, and the people around him, in the present tense,” Harmer says. “Lyrically, you can hear him grow up and move through life.”

Adding to the growing pains was the fact that guitarist Chris Walla, who helped found the band in the mid-’90s, announced he was leaving Death Cab midway through the making of Kintsugi. He finished the album, but Death Cab for Cutie’s lineup is now down to Gibbard, Harmer, and drummer Jason McGerr. The live show adds multi-instrumentalists Dave Depper and Zac Rae.

The personal and professional departures meant Death Cab for Cutie had to rebuild. The feat is reflected in the album title, which alludes to the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. Sonically, the record fills the cracks with electronic ambiance. “Little Wanderer” is lined with digi-spiked beats and watery, “Enjoy the Silence”–period Depeche Mode guitar, while “Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)” is a glitter-ball-lit kiss-off to the rich and famous.

Despite these added textures, the group hasn’t turned its back on 20 years of musical history. Gibbard’s sentimental, soft-touch vocals, for instance, are a dead giveaway that this is still Death Cab.

“One of the most important tasks in front of us, as a band, is to make sure that we never make a person who got a Death Cab for Cutie tattoo regret getting it,” Harmer explains of an apparent legion of ink-soaked adorers. “It sounds kind of funny, but by that they made a lifelong commitment to our band, and I don’t want to turn into the kind of band that’s a fraction of what it once was because we were too proud to hang it up when we needed to.”

With Death Cab for Cutie heading out on a Canada-wide stadium tour with Metric this week, it seems as if practising Kintsugi patched the band up pretty good.

Death Cab for Cutie plays UBC’s Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre on Friday (April 1).