Kevin Bronson on January 14th, 2011

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Cold War Kids have logged a lot of miles since the SoCal-bred quartet first arrived six years ago with their spare, bluesy indie-rock. Two albums, “Robbers & Cowards” (2006) and “Loyalty to Loyalty” (2008), established them as deft storytellers, but for their third, “Mine Is Yours” (due Jan. 25 on Downtown), they’ve turned the narratives on themselves, punctuating their confessionals with a bolder sound.

Singer Nathan Willett penned lyrics that wrestle with relationships and commitment. The sonics fashioned by guitarist Jonnie Russell, bassist Matt Maust and drummer Matt Aveiro seem bigger thanks to the touches of producer Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Kings of Leon, Norah Jones, Modest Mouse, Lissie). Neither getting personal with the music nor working with a big-name producer was a step Cold War Kids took lightly, Willett says, “but it was time for us to be more ambitious and have higher expectations.”

• ||| Download: “Louder Than Ever”

Thanks to Willett’s distinctive yowl and the stabbing licks of Russell and Maust, “Mine Is Yours” still sounds like Cold War Kids. Here, though, the melodies are immediate, the choruses more memorable, the message more direct. “Let’s skip the charades / You’re seeing right though me anyway / Can we just speak plain? / We’re playing for the same team,” Willett sings in the ringing anthem “Skip the Charades.” If Cold War Kids came off in the past as outsiders – whether owing to their roots in O.C. and Long Beach, or the fractured protagonists in their songs, or their minimalist aesthetic – those days are past. (In fact, all four members have recently relocated to Los Angeles.)

I caught up with Willett before a series of local CWK appearances surrounding the release – including a private session at the 98.7 FM Historic Hollywood Penthouse on Tuesday, a show at the Bootleg Theater on Jan. 24, an in-store at Amoeba on Jan. 25 and an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on Jan. 26:

Not that the first two albums didn’t have a certain maturity, but “Mine Is Yours” sounds all grown up. Does it feel like a departure to you?

It’s one of those endless [paradoxes]. We’re always talking about artists expanding what they do, and refining it, but not losing what’s at the core of it. We needed to go a slightly different direction. People know our music as character-driven and playful, but this is more straightforward and candid. The band has been our life for five years, and this album reflects how we’ve grown.

It’s not an enormous departure, but in the production sense what Jacquire did for us was to take the songs we write and move them to a higher place. They sound bigger, and not because there’s 12 layers of keyboards or anything.

Did the process of making the record, or the knowledge that you were going to be working with a big producer, affect the songwriting in any way?

Only in that we wanted to be at our very best, not just in the creation but in the execution.

You’ve said that by and large the songs are more personal, that they deal with the push and pull of relationships. What has happened that informed that?

The four of us have always had a big group of friends. Between the first and second records, we didn’t really have any time to re-connect with them. Then we get back from touring the second album, and we had more time at home, and it seemed like everything changed. I think it’s part of crossing over into your 30s – you’ve lived your life a certain way with a certain amount of freedom. Then it seems like all of a sudden everybody got into these committed relationships. Some were successful, some were unsuccessful, but what is on the album is kind of a realization and an examination of that. I felt lyrically like I wanted to do more journalism and less fictionalizing.

Was there an aha moment?

There was, as there is with anything where there are growing pains. I think it came during pre-production in Nashville when I started working on lyrics. I went through something that was unique for me – waking up in the morning and writing as if I were going to work. There was a danger of thinking too hard, of losing spontaneity, but I wanted the songs to reflect something deeper and it took me a long time to get there. Even to say the simplest of things.

Some of the most trite pop songs risk themselves a lot more than indie rock, because they put their heart out there. It’s the old “saying something” thing. I felt like it took me a while to get my head around it.

It’s going to be weird not writing “Long Beach-based” in front of “Cold War Kids.” Do you feel like in some ways you’ve joined civilization?

The move was a long time coming. From the time we started out – school, being in Whittier, Long Beach – we’ve never been at the center of the action. Being in the middle of the music world was not something we tried to be a part of; we wanted to stay outside it. But gradually we wanted to [circulate] in a world were we have common pursuits in the arts and in music with the people who live around us.

||| Live: Cold War Kids play the Bootleg Theater on Jan. 24.

||| Watch: “Skip the Charades,” live from Jack White’s Third Man Studios in Nashville, recorded Dec. 12: