The Raveonettes [ tickets ], a Danish duo made up of singer/songwriter/guitarist Sune Rose Wagner and singer/bassist Sharin Foo, have a brand new album out and are in the midst of touring the globe in support of it. Entitled "Lust Lust Lust," the pair's fourth album is both self-produced and self-recorded, a tidbit that's not too surprising once you get to know these two do-it-yourself style musicians.

The indie rockers just completed a monthlong trek of the US that took them from coast to coast with a handful of stops in various Canadian provinces along the way. Since The Raveonettes tour without the help of the usual tour manager, the amount of work can be overwhelming and lead to occasional bickering.

"There's a lot of work to do in a band apart from playing music. There are a lot of decisions to make. It's good that we're only two people, otherwise it would get really rowdy," said Sharin Foo.

The Raveonettes [ tickets ] are currently playing a few gigs throughout Australia before heading to Europe in May.

LiveDaily: 'So the word out there critically, beside the rave reviews, is that the new album is a much darker album, both sonically and thematically. Do you agree with this?

Wagner & Foo in unison: Yes.

What brought about the change?

Wagner: Personal experiences, and I think we wanted to do something that was a little bit more ... I think both of us really like dark and sinister, gloomy music, and I think the last album we did was in a different direction, so I think we were ready to go into ourselves a little bit more, so to speak.

Foo: I think it's not a conscious decision like, "Now we're going to make a dark album." It's what we gravitate towards when we're in the creative process of making an album, and that was just what seemed like we were both attracted to at the time when the album was falling into place. It was just the sound we liked and what emotionally appealed to us at the time. Like Sune was saying, "Pretty in Black" was, in some ways, a brighter, more organic sounding album. This one ["Lust Lust Lust"] is very dark and cold.

Wagner: "Pretty in Black" was based on a more traditional sense of storytelling, using different characters and disguising oneself within the stories. This one is a more open and more first-person kind of thing.

How do the two of you collaborate on music?

Wagner: We shoot files back and forth. I come up with the song and then I send it over to Sharin and I get her opinion on it and we tweak things around. We just send songs back and forth in that way because we don't live in the same city. She's West Coast. I'm East Coast. It works out fine. We never really collaborated on the songwriting anyway, so it's just more what kind of mood we're looking for, what kind of style or a certain feel of a song. I initially come up with the idea and the song, and I send it over to Sharin and then we take it from there.

So where do you find you draw most of your inspiration from when you write music?

Wagner: From life. From experiences, and then the usual--from all of the arts.

Are there any tracks in particular that you feel emotionally connected to?

Foo: A lot of them! There's a song called "Expelled From Love" on the album that, immediately when Sune sent it to me and I heard it the first time, I thought it was such a haunting melody and one of the most beautiful melodies that he'd ever written. There's a lot of the songs that we're very emotionally attached to, both of us. When you make an album, you live with them and spend time with the songs and they just become part of you.

Any of the songs that you particularly enjoy performing live?

Wagner: "Aly, Walk With Me" is a really fun song to play live because it's really simple and there's a lot of dynamics in the song. There's a lot of free room where we don't sing, we actually just get to play a lot of noisy guitars and stuff, which is always fun. Sometimes, when you're both singing and you're tied down to the microphone a lot, it's kind of nice to just let go and just play your instrument.

Foo: It's also unusual for us to have very long songs, and "Aly, Walk With Me" is more than five minutes. We're used to the one-minute-and thirty-seconds sort of thing.

I read in an interview last fall that one of the main reasons you decided to go indie was due to your desire to experiment with visuals in your music videos. Is that true?

Foo: That's not exactly correct. That was part of us growing up being on Columbia Records, and part of us moving on was just to go with some independent labels. It was just a natural progression for us at this time or at this stage. We only have good things to say about our time with our first label. I think what we were talking about with videos was that sometimes we would have ideas that could seem controversial maybe for a more major label, like Sune dressing up as a woman and things like that. They didn't really want to go with it.

Do you ever get into any arguments with each other?

Wagner: Yeah, a lot.

Over what usually?

Wagner: It can be about everything, really. It can be creative decisions or touring stuff, anything, really, that people argue about. And we don't tour with a tour manager either, so there's a lot more responsibility in the pre-production of a tour, can you say that?

Foo: On-tour production.

Wagner: On tour and post. Pre, on and post! So much responsibility. It's insane!

You're bound to clash sooner or later.

Foo: Who's going to pick up the rental car the next day ... there's a lot of things, but we don't really fight violently--but we like to email each other really angry emails.

So are they usually resolved online then? At a safe distance?

Wagner: Usually, or we'll talk about it when we meet.

See The Raveonettes' exclusive performance for LiveDaily Sessions.