The quote "there's no place like home" applied readily to the dance-punk duo Matt and Kim while they were recording their second album, "Grand." Instead of heading to a fancy studio to track the collection, they camped out at Matt's parents' house in Vermont.

"We initially tracked it in Vermont in the bedroom I grew up in, in my parents' house," said Matt, whose surname is Johnson, during an interview with LiveDaily. "We did our last recording in a studio out in L.A. We didn't have much time and we had to rush through it. For the most part, we like stuff that's not super hi-fi. I kept asking them to make it sound shittier. I was like, 'If I want to make it sound shittier, I can just do it myself.' So we did. We did it ourselves there so we could have the ultimate freedom."

That freedom allowed Matt and Kim (whose last name is Schifino) to explore more sounds during the recording process. Matt admitted he was a little leery of what fans may think about the diverse album, several tracks from which are streaming at the act's MySpace page.

"Some of our songs sound a bit different than they used to," Matt said. "We knew that was going to happen when we went in to record it. That's why we didn't want anyone to think that ... we went to some brand new studio and a producer convinced us to make sounds like this. This is the album we wanted to make since square one."

For "Grand," released on Jan. 20, Matt and Kim used instruments ranging from a melodica (a tiny piano that a musician blows into) to a standard piano, in lieu of a synthesizer.

"We just did so much different instrumentation," Johnson continued. "Going into this, we believed a good recorded song and a good live song are two very different things. We just recorded our songs like we played them live on the last record. We just wanted to make the best recorded album.

"After so long of not making a recording and working so long on this album, we're pretty pleased [with how] it came out."