Keith Jeffery is the lead vocalist and guitarist of the alternative rock band Atlas Genius from Australia. Since the band’s conception, half its original members left — only two from the original group remain. The musicians in Atlas Genius are self-made men who went from indie to Warner Brothers signees and released their most recent album, “Inanimate Objects” in August. Calling in from a tour stop in Toronto, Jeffery spoke to WSN about the myth of the rushed sophomore release, working with a pop producer to construct a rawer record and having your primary fan base thousands of miles away.

WSN: A majority of your first album was recorded in your self-built studio. Did recording in a professional studio feel different?

KJ: We actually started to do the second one in the same studio but I felt like I needed to get out of that environment to finish the album, so we moved to the valley, in Los Angeles. We kept doing it by ourselves for a while, in a house we were living in, but I wanted to get someone to co-produce the album with us. I wanted to have a sounding board, you know? Someone who you trusted, that you could invite onto the team. And that’s not an easy task for us — we’re very particular — and I didn’t want someone just for the sake of it. It had to be the right person.

WSN: With your long touring schedules, the timetable for writing and recording “Inanimate Objects” must have been much more condensed. Was that a hard adjustment to make?

KJ: People often talk about the first album being the easiest because you have a lot of time to write it, but I actually felt like we had more time to get it right. It was such a mad rush to put an album together after “Trojans” started to blow up. We had an EP that we wrote shortly after that, put that out, then we started touring. That was a crazy, super rushed process. Initially, we thought we’d take three or four months off to do the album, but it took well over a year to do this album.

WSN: What was one of the lessons you learned while working on this record?

KJ: I had a really interesting moment about four or five months ago: I was in the complex in Los Angeles where we did the album, and there was a guy in the studio downstairs. We got chatty, we were talking about music and he wasn’t familiar with the band. He said, “what do you guys sound like?” The best thing to do is play a track — I can’t explain how it sounds, it’s more effective if you listen to the song. So I played “Trojans,” and I remember listening back and thinking, “man, I would change so many things about this song now.” The interesting lesson in that for me was at that point in time, it felt perfect. Yet four years later, we’re human beings that now aren’t satisfied with what I thought was perfection. The lesson is that there is no such thing as perfection; it’s really just your tastes. The thing is to get it as good as you possibly can without driving yourself insane, because sometimes the roughness or the imperfections are what make something beautiful.

A version of this article appeared in the Sept. 27 print edition. Email Zane Warman at [email protected].