The Decemberists: The coolest months

The Hazards of Love is no exception to the idiosyncratic style that The Decemberists have come to be known for. According to frontman and guitarist Colin Meloy, it’s heavily influenced by the British Folk Revival of the 1960s, even borrowing its title from an EP by Anne Briggs, a singer-songwriter who spearheaded the movement. Yet the band’s trademark storytelling concept remains intact, as The Hazards follows the journey of a woman named Margaret, and her encounters with a shapeshifter, her lover, a forest queen and a “rake”, the bizarre subject of the first single.

Musically, the band continues to push past the quaint limitations of the folk rock genre. “Obviously there’s lots of Sabbathy riffage in there," says Meloy. "With me being a more recent Black Sabbath fan, it’s been more present when I've been writing lately.”

The most taxing aspect of recording the album surfaced as the band were trying to pull the technical aspect of certain songs together, something Meloy says the band has never experienced trouble with in the past.

“It really became difficult when we were trying to record it and everything was set up in pieces,” he reflects. “It just came to a point about halfway through the process where everything was sort of disassembled and laying out so we could work on it, but we couldn’t actually see the forest for the trees.”

For the first time, the band collaborated with Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark and My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden, along with My Morning Jacket’s Jim Jones, who each lend their voice to the different characters in the album’s story.

“When I was working on this project, and it was shaping up to be like my first attempt at writing a staged musical, I started casting some fellow musicians that I thought were really good,” explains Meloy. “And so while working on the songs, Becky and Shara were in my head the entire time.”

Before embarking on a nationwide tour in the US, the band is slated to play The Hazards of Love in its entirety for the first time at the annual SxSW music festival in Austin this month. “It’s going to be kind of crazy,” laughs Meloy. “It’ll be a good way to smash a bottle of champagne over it."

But the past year wasn’t just about recording new material. The band also had a brief foray into politics and campaigned for Barack Obama, where they played a show for the then-presidential candidate in their native Portland. Although Meloy says that he’s “not going to stand on stage at one of our shows and give a tirade about a political cause”, he says growing up with a “very politically progressive family” makes it hard not to want to share some views with fans.

Mindful that time doesn't forget the forefathers of rock and folklore who informed what his band does, Meloy sincerely hopes that the new record might encourage fans to explore music and stories of historical importance that they might not normally experience. “All that stuff is really the basis and foundation of a lot of the music we listen to do today.” He lingers for a second. "Even if it has gone through a lot of changes.”

Meloy's keen not to make an academic exercise out of it, though. “You’re not supposed to be sitting there taking notes while you listen to the record," he says. “But if it were to be a launching point for an interest in folk music, I say that’s awesome. Or maybe someone will go out and buy their first Sabbath record. That will never stop being a good thing.”