A lot has happened since Auckland band the Mint Chicks shot to fame in 2007.
They relocated to Portland, Oregon, lost their bass player on the way and recorded a new album.
Screens is the highly anticipated follow-up album to Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!, which reached number one in the New Zealand music charts and won five New Zealand Music Awards including album of the year, best group and best rock album in 2007.
Being showered with awards can get to people's heads.
So the Mint Chicks found themselves a new home in the United States and started to work on a new album, while playing as a virtually unknown band in front of small audiences.
"I suppose there was a little bit of pressure, just because of the awards and all those things," singer Kody Nielson says.
"But when you're trying to do something creative, that just gets in the way, you get writer's block...
"We just got on with it and tried to not take that too seriously because it got to be its own album anyway," he says.
Screens follows the path laid down by the 2006 record.
While the Mint Chicks' 2005 debut album F**k the Golden Youth was dominated by raw and ragged pop melodies and experimental noise rock, Screens offers more refined song-writing and production.
The first single, I Can't Stop Being Foolish, is a catchy pop tune with a very dark edge.
The downbeat lyrics contrast with a jaunty melody and sum up what the band describes as "troublegum pop".
When brothers Kody (vocals and keyboard) and Ruben Nielson (guitar) decided in 2007 to move to Portland, where they have family, drummer Paul Roper tagged along, but bass-player Michael Logie decided to leave the band and head to the UK instead.
It took the band a while to adjust to the reduced line-up.
"We first thought about getting a new bass player, because some people offered to take the part over in the States, but we just thought we didn't want a new personality in the band," Kody explains.
"At first I was playing a bit of bass on the keyboard and that was all right, but kind of restricting because I was stuck around the keyboard," says the singer who is known for his ecstatic stage antics.
His 2005 Big Day Out performance involved wielding a chainsaw on stage and destroying a corporate sponsor's overly prominent sign with it.
Instead of playing bass on every song on the keyboard, the band ended up recording samples.
On top of that, Ruben equipped his guitar with a pitch shifter and is using a guitar - as well as a bass amplifier.
Although the arrangement of the songs had to change, the songwriting remains on the same lines.
"Ruben and me write them in a similar way to how we always have," Kody says.
"Chords and lyrics and then we mess around with them in different arrangements; some of them take a couple of years and some take a couple of weeks."
The first song on Screens is the first song the Mint Chicks ever wrote, when they were all still attending Orewa College.
"We were going to release it on our first EP in 2003 but the label said: 'save it for the album'.
When the album came out we weren't playing it any more, but then we remembered it and rearranged it for the three-piece thing."
The Nielson brothers took their time to refine the album's production and mixing, taking everything in their own hands.
"We did the bulk of the actual recording at the beginning of last year, went on a tour, came back and kept working on it, doing more overdubs with keyboards and horns," Kody explains.
He acknowledges that the album would probably sound completely different if the band hadn't moved to the US.
"It's a good thing to be isolated over there, not having family and old friends around you. Just hearing their opinions might slightly change what you're doing subconsciously," he says.
What's more, the Mint Chicks had the opportunity to use the mixing facilities of a couple of Portland studios with proven track records.
The work took place in The Dandy Warhols' Odditorium studio, Audible Alchemy (Modest Mouse) and Supernatural (The Shins) - and the Nielson brothers' father's studio in Orewa.
Although living half a world away, the band got some encouragement from back home.
In 2008 the Mint Chicks released an iTunes-only single, Life Will Get Better Some Day, which not only received a lot of airplay in New Zealand, but was also short-listed for Apra's songwriting award, the Silver Scroll.
"We were just struggling through the recording," Kody remembers.
"And it's good to hear that it was doing so well. We got updates now and then, but then we didn't really know or care about what was going on in New Zealand," he says.
After spending the summer back home and playing a couple of shows in New Zealand, the band will head back to Portland.
The next step is finding a label to release Screens in the US.
"We are in touch with a few labels but we want the best deal."
