No One Was Hurt Making This Album

“Stupid.” That’s the word the English rocker Jason Pierce keeps coming back to when he describes how he made the latest album by Spiritualized, “And Nothing Hurt,” due Friday. It has been six years between albums for Spiritualized, the band Pierce started in 1990, and as he worked on the new record, he often said it would be his last one.

“I push hardest against my own stupidity,” he said in an interview on a visit to New York City. “Every time I make a record, I forget everything I’ve learned about how to make a record. My friends say: ‘Come on, you know how to do this. How many records have you made?’ But it seems like I don’t think of the most logical way to do something.”

Although he has been performing since the post-punk 1980s and has headlined theaters with Spiritualized, Pierce, 53, shows no rock-star swagger. Conversing over coffee, across a kitchen table in a Lower East Side apartment borrowed from the owner of his label, Fat Possum, he wore a brash Guitar Army T-shirt with a black-and-white photo of Fred (Sonic) Smith from the MC5. But Pierce was soft-spoken and self-questioning, earnest about music — his own and, even more so, the musicians he admires, from Buddy Holly to Lee (Scratch) Perry — and he was determined not to make any outsize claims.

“More than one person has said I’ve been writing the same song all my life,” he mused.

Spiritualized has always made music that conjures vast expanses, both inner and external. During the 1980s, recording as J. Spaceman, Pierce was a member of Spacemen 3, a collaborative band that explored drones, riffs and noise on albums like the 1990 “Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To.” With Spiritualized, Pierce stepped forward as a bandleader and wrapped clearer song structures around his sonic maelstroms.

While they can hark back to rockabilly, soul, country, garage rock and gospel, Spiritualized songs are never simply retro; they have their own uprooted, unmoored tone. Pierce’s voice has always been unheroic, seeming to fight its own scratchy hesitancy, in songs that contemplate pain, confusion, loneliness, estrangement and uncertain hope. The chords are basic, but the settings are larger than life, “like a field recording that’s made by Phil Spector,” Pierce said.

“You’re taking something so simple, and pushing and pushing it so it becomes something so grand, like this kind of absolute obsession, trying to push it almost to its breaking point. But I don’t think I sit there and say ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ It’s just force of habit.”

Often described as “psychedelic” — a term that makes Pierce wary — Spiritualized has been through many incarnations: as a standard rock band with a shifting lineup and, in recent years, as Pierce’s solo project, fleshed out on tour with backup musicians. In 2016, Pierce interrupted the making of “And Nothing Hurt” for near-20th-anniversary performances, with gospel choir and orchestra, of the beloved 1997 Spiritualized album “Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.”

As he made “And Nothing Hurt,” his first Spiritualized album since 2012, “I wanted it to be about time and my age,” Pierce said. “I thought, if I’m going to make a record at my age, there has to be a reason that it should be there, that it should exist. And it shouldn’t be me trying to pretend I’m 23. The language had to be relative to me now, and I wanted to make something that reflected that passage of time.”

He added: “I like rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s sort of a young person’s game, isn’t it? It’s full of the folly and stupidity and arrogance of youth. And that’s great, and that’s what makes that energy. So it was so important not to pretend that that’s what it was about.”

Although a few upbeat rockers erupt mid-album, much of “And Nothing Hurt” has a pensive tone, moving at the tempo of slow soul ballads as the lyrics ponder fading love, human frailty and mortality. Thoughts of death have been part of Spiritualized’s songs from the beginning, and during the 2000s Pierce nearly died, from double pneumonia that stopped his heart in 2005 and severe long-term liver disease a few years later. But as its title suggests, “And Nothing Hurt” distances itself from pain, greeting the inevitable with calm acceptance. In “The Prize,” swaying serenely amid the sounds of organ chords and chimes like church bells, Pierce sings, “Gonna be shooting like a star across the sky/Gonna burn brightly for a while, then you’re gone.”

The album is a kind of benediction. “I think it’s a very optimistic record, or quietly optimistic. That was the intention,” Pierce said. “Sure the lines aren’t all about sunshine and flowers, but there’s a sense of satisfaction. There are never any regrets in there.” As the album ends with “Sail on Through,” a crescendo of leave-taking that’s also a vow of devotion, blips of Morse code spell out “And nothing hurts.” Pierce does have regrets, or at least second thoughts, about how he made the album. From the beginning, he said, he had a clear idea for the ambience of the music. He wanted it to sound like something recorded in hallowed acoustic spaces like Columbia and Capitol Studios, where Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra recorded classic albums.

“My original line, on the top of the recording list, was that it would sound like something that came from Columbia studios, but broadcast from a satellite,” he said. “I had this idea way back, where I always thought that the music I love most appears like it just dropped out of the sky, like it was broadcast from some strange satellite.”

But the songs for the album weren’t yet written or arranged; there was no way to simply gather musicians and perform them. Nor did Pierce have the kind of huge budget a long stint in a professional studio would have required. Instead, in a process he matter-of-factly calls “obsessive,” he chose the exact opposite of real-time studio recording. He assembled nearly all of “And Nothing Hurt” by himself, with Pro Tools on a laptop in his bedroom.

“I chose the longest, hardest way,” he observed. “That was not my best move.”

When he wanted a string-section part, for instance, he combed his record collection to find an orchestra playing the right note. “I was getting tiny pieces of recorded violin that I put together to make things that sound real,” he said. “It’s kind of stupid. Hindsight is a great thing, isn’t it? But I did it. There isn’t a single bit on that record where anybody plays in the same room as somebody else is playing. It’s pieced together, bit by bit. It feels like the most ludicrous way of putting something together, and the longer it went on the more stupid it seemed.”

But the solitary, painstaking recording also allowed Pierce to follow every glimmer of an idea. He kept on recording parts, he said, until he reached a Pro Tools limit: more than 200 tracks. “I don’t mind going down avenues that don’t go anywhere, just to say OK, that doesn’t work,'” he said. “But usually something happens that you go, we would never have found that had we not gone this way.”

Since his London apartment is on a main route to a major hospital, he noted, “Every track has about seven or eight ambulance sounds on it.” And in the final stages of recording, he booked a few days of studio time with musicians to add instruments he doesn’t play: horns, upright bass, timpani.

Is it going to be his last album? He’s no longer so sure. “When I said before that this is probably my last album, it’s like complaining about something that I’m not really complaining about. I feel like the luckiest man in the world doing this.

“I don’t know that I can’t ever make records again. All my friends say that as soon as I go back on the road and play these things live and realize how beautiful that thing is, you’ll want to do it again. And you’ll get into the same cycle of it, and you’ll moan about it again, And we’ll have to suffer you one more time.”