Of all the bands born during punk rock’s first wave in the mid-1970s, Wire has proven to be the most durable–partly because they’ve never sat still for long, and chiefly because they’ve never stopped evolving.

Inspired by the Do-It-Yourself aesthetic of punk but too independent-minded to toe any genre lines, art-school students Colin Newman, Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis, and Robert Gotobed (nee Grey) formed Wire in 1976. Though they could barely play their instruments at the time, they pounded out one of British rock’s most influential debut albums, Pink Flag, in 1977. The record’s blend of artistic experimentation and ferocious minimalism registered strongly with everyone from Brit-pop band Elastica (who liberally borrowed the central riff from Pink Flag’s “Three Girl Rhumba” for their Top 10 hit, “Connection”) to American hardcore acts like Black Flag and Minor Threat.

Within a year of Pink Flag’s release, however, Wire were already sprinting ahead creatively with nary a glance back. The band’s next two records, 1978’s Chairs Missing and 1979’s 154, saw them broaden their artistic palate with keyboard textures that amplified their knack for creating an atmosphere of disorientation and taut unease. Over the ensuing three decades, Wire’s oscillated between sleekly experimental synth-pop, lush artistry, and unbridled loud-as-fuck fury as they’ve seen fit. True to its ongoing journey, the 2013 edition of Wire–singer/guitarist Newman, bassist/singer Lewis, drummer Grey, and new guitarist Matthew Sims–remains a constantly morphing organism, and that creative restlessness informs the band’s newest work in the best way.

They masterfully blended their ferocity with beguiling pop hooks and cinematic ambiance on 2011’s Red Barked Tree, and their newest effort Change Becomes Us finds Wire returning to obscure older material (most famously their notoriously prickly 1981 live release, Document and Eyewitness) to transform a jumble of promising but incomplete pieces into a rich and varied new set of songs.

That aesthetic extended to their recent Wire DRILL: Seattle Festival, a three-day event at the end of November that eschewed big names in favor of local talent like Earth and Chastity Belt. Wire threw themselves into the festival, opening unannounced before Earth’s headlining set and collaborating onstage with several other bands throughout. DRILL: Seattle culminated at Neumo’s on November 23, with a stunning headlining performance from Wire themselves that incontrovertibly confirmed the band’s still-considerable live power.

Fools often go where angels fear to tread, so despite having next to no prep time, I leaped at the opportunity to interview Wire online. What started out as a hastily-compiled set of emailed questions blossomed into a 35-minute audio file in my SunBreak inbox, with Sims reading my questions aloud while he and founding members Newman and Lewis answered them in their Seattle-bound tour van. Their insightful, often funny, and (much to my relief) patient responses to my queries made trimming the resulting 3,900-word (!) transcript exceptionally challenging.

Change Becomes Us sounds like you’ve cherry-picked through pieces from Document and Eyewitness and other earlier material, and used some of those bits in service of creating something new and fresh. Could you cite a specific example of how you used some of those fragments?

Colin Newman: Well, you look at something like something like “Love Bends.” There was “Piano Tuner [from Document],” which had basically ten seconds of pretty good intro, and then not much else happens. In the process of going through it, we as a band learned the basic riff in the studio. I decided it needed a different bit which wasn’t in the original. So I did a simple change, which I orchestrated off a count. We recorded it through once. And then Graham had made a mistake on his bass, so he went in to do his bass again. During the process of re-recording the bass, he changed from following around the riff of the guitar into playing the same notes but in a slightly different rhythm, which opened up a whole new possibility of where you go could go with the vocal.

Graham Lewis: [Change Becomes Us] was probably more than we could have hoped for. The end result just transcends those very small, jewel-like beginnings.

Wire’s more recent records (this one, Red Barked Tree, and Object 47) are much more awash in atmosphere and less about the visceral punch that informed Send and the Read and Burn EPs from the early 2000’s. The songs feel more textural, sometimes even beautiful in places. Could you address this shift in direction for the band?

CN: I think what we’ve done over the last two albums especially, is: We’re playing the classic cards. This is Wire, pure and simple. Send was a concept. Send was “This is what you do if you’ve spent 15 years listening to dance music, and you’re suddenly feeling a rock aesthetic again.” And then take that…It’s sort of Fatboy Slim on steroids.

GL: It’s also taking out an insurance policy about people thinking, “Oh, aren’t these old men playing something rather mellow?” And the concept says no, because the beats per minute are at least 130.

CN: [But] there’s nothing wrong with beautiful. I think we’ve always done beautiful, hopefully.

How did your newest member Matt Sims come to join the band, and what does he contribute to Wire’s current sound?

GL: Not a lot really (laughs).

Matt Sims: Next question (laughs)…

CN: No blushing, Sims… Matt passed an audition with flying colors.  There were other people who auditioned for the part, who played the songs technically as well. But Matt not only knew the songs he had to learn, he also had the right sounds for them, pre-programmed. Matt is an investor: He invests in what he does. He invests his time, his energy, himself. And we couldn’t really fail to be impressed. After the last person left the room, Graham turned to me and Rob and said, “It’s got to be Matt, doesn’t it?” Everyone was like, “Of course.”

GL: What does he bring to the table? Well, we’re still waiting to find out, really…Donuts, mostly. He does like a good donut…I would say the simple thing is [to Matt], you bring your intuition to it. We work in the same way.

MS: I would agree with that assessment.

GL: From what I’ve seen of a lot of other groups, people seem to spend an awful lot of time talking about things; like what it is they’re doing or something. We tend to sort of get on with doing it, and you kind of appreciate that, too.

CN: To put it simply, Matt is one of us. We recognized it more or less from day one.

MS: We’re gonna have to move on now (laughs)…

There was a time when Wire steadfastly avoided playing anything from their first few records. Though you’re still very much moving forward and not dwelling on the past, there seems to be less resistance to doing some of the old songs. Is this a fair assessment, and if so/not, why/why not?

GL: Yeah, it has changed. Largely, it had everything to do with the internet, really; the fact that everything is available at the same time now. In lots of ways, historic differences have been ironed out with the material.

We’re doing two things at once. Yes, we’re playing material from the last record, but already we’re looking towards the future and we’re playing things which haven’t been recorded yet. At the same time, there were old things that we decided to include because they made the frame really interesting and kind of completed the picture, if you like–the larger picture of the set.

Wire songs have always included lyrics that evoke strong imagery and emotions, even when they’re not always making literal sense. How do the lyricists in Wire view the words that accompany the music (As poetry? Commentary? One more instrument in the mix?)?

GL: I think we ignore the poetry aspect. I don’t think that’s too relevant, really. I think you write because you notice things. That’s why I write anyway, and I tend to then put them down so that I don’t forget. And then they tend to meet other things that I thought I shouldn’t forget, and hopefully something interesting happens between them. I think a lot of the time, what happens is: As soon as you do notice things, and you reveal their detail, that’s usually when people say, “Oh, that’s really weird! That’s so obscure!” And, it’s like, it’s not. It’s just a change of focus.

What do you find most satisfying about Wire creatively?

CN: There’s two different things: There’s Wire as a live entity, and Wire as a recorded entity. And the two things are in a way, the same but very different, and the gratification in them is very different.

As a live entity, Wire can stand on the stage and totally convince. And we’ve become increasingly good at doing it. We can play a show and have an audience saying, “That’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen,” at the end of it, which is a fantastic feeling…

GL: Do you lack confidence (laughs)?

CN: …Whereas, recording-wise, I think there is a certain (certainly as far as I’m concerned) hankering after audio perfection—just going after something that is absolutely peerless. Whatever it is that you’re doing, make it the best version of it you can possibly do. That sometimes takes time and patience, and a certain amount of thinking and fiddling to make that work. But I’m into the idea of production as a pretty transparent thing. If at the end of the process, people are thinking it’s just Wire playing in a room, I’ve done my job pretty well.