Recording its sophomore effort, "Mean Everything to Nothing," was a difficult task for Atlanta pop band Manchester Orchestra [ tickets ].

The band's debut album, 2007's "I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child," was a coming-of-age chronicle that expressed the hopes and aspirations of then-19-year-old vocalist/guitarist Andy Hull. But whereas the songs on the debut were voiced by a fictional cast of characters that Hull created to obscure his emotions, the personal songs on "Mean Everything to Nothing" are him.

"I was able to be more honest when singing as someone else," said Hull, who is now 22. "Now I've realized, although it's incredibly difficult, it's more powerful to just say it myself."

But it was difficult for other reasons as well. "Mean Everything To Nothing" was produced by Joe Chiccarelli in conjunction with Dan Hannon and Manchester Orchestra. Chiccarelli, Hull said, was "very old school."

"It's all done very gradually and by finding the right tones and the right everything, basically," Hull said about the recording process with Chiccarelli. "And doing 20 to 25 takes in a day--it's a long process."

To inject energy into the project, the band--which also includes bassist Jonathan Corley, drummer Jeremiah Edmond, keyboardist/vocalist Chris Freeman and guitarist Robert McDowell--tapped longtime friend Hannon.

"He joined this record about halfway through and really pumped fresh blood into it," Hull said. "Having somebody else's ear after you've been doing it for so long and then taking it in the direction we originally wanted to take it in ... for a minute, it's like we lost our direction of where we were going. It was just so mindless, over and over and over again."

That original direction, he said, was to make a "big, mammoth-type of record."

"We just tried to make the biggest-sounding record that we could," Hull said of the collection, which hits stores April 21. "That was our goal. The last record we had released, we [wrote and recorded it] when we were much younger. So this is just very easy and smooth to write and difficult to record, but mostly because we were doing it all live. It's good. I like it."