The three members of Tricot all grew up near Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto: Nakajima and Kida in the neighboring Shiga Prefecture, while Sagane called the city home. “My dad had a guitar while I was growing up, but he only taught me to play a C chord,” Kida says. “I learned more from the back of music magazines, which had chord progressions printed in them.” She would eventually followed the same path as Nakajima and Sagane—they all joined their individual school’s band club, and played in various rock groups around town, before rearranging into their current configuration.

From the get-go, this mishmash of influences resulted in a whirlwind sound all their own. On 2012’s maniacally arranged “G.N.S.,” each sonic turn is executed like it was plotted out on graph paper, while Nakajima’s acrobatic, reverb-washed voice imbues the song with an emotional volatility. This year’s “E” finds the singer hurtling from a hushed tone to a rat-a-tat-paced croon, eventually reaching full-on cathartic cry when the chorus hits. “We usually focus on the sounds first,” explains Nakajima. “After that, we put the lyrics on top of that.”

They sometimes draw from personal experience for the latter—for “E,” Nakajima wrote about computer hacking following an incident in which her Twitter account was compromised—but they also go in more abstract directions. “On ‘Ochansensu-su,’ we had just been talking about alternate names for orange juice,” Nakajima says as her bandmates laugh. “We kept saying that over and over again.”