MUSIC PREVIEW

The Walkmen

With: Woods, Coke Weed.

Where: Mr. Smalls, Millvale.

When: 8 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $20; 1-866-4683401. I don’t know if the music comes across that way if you don’t look at it through that filter.”

With the members of the band now split between Brooklyn, Philadelphia and New Orleans, a lot of the writing on the album was done via email.

“Back 15 years ago or whatever, it would have been like ‘This is the end of the line.’ We barely got together,” Mr. Leithauser says. “It’s a lot of working alone. We only got together twice — me and Walt [Martin, the bassist/organist] and Paul [Maroon, the guitarist] in New York. When you get everyone in the room it becomes slow and unproductive, so it’s a little lonely, but I think we got the job done a lot faster.”

The album was produced by Phil Ek (Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses) at a remote studio in the woods of Washington state, but a pastoral sound doesn’t sneak into the Walkmen’s elegant pop style.

“Everything is written by the time you get there, so I don’t know if it sounds like woods music,” he says.

In fact, while he was working on the album, the singer was reading a Sinatra bio and immersing himself in the music of Ol’ Blue Eyes.

“He has the strongest voice of all time, and he’s got a lot of versatility,” he says. This album sounds nothing like Sinatra, he notes, but says, “Maybe in the future it will have an effect. It’s just what I was listening to the most.”

Despite the Walkmen still struggling in a van and playing clubs rather than theaters, he expects the band to continue on well past the 10-year mark.

“Yeah,” he says, “I don’t have any other backup plan.”