Imagine a rocket orbiting Earth in ever tighter and faster spirals. This is the story of Seattle rock mainstays Kinski since they started up in 1998. Their new album 7 (or 8), via Kill Rock Stars, represents the culmination of a catalog that started in deep space (see past albums SpaceLaunch for Frenchie, Be Gentle with the Warm Turtle, and Airs Above Your Station) before gradually descending closer to terra firma. They’ve been muscling up the riffs, getting more linear with their songwriting, and veering away from their astral and jammy inclinations.

One of their most concise full-lengths, 7 (or 8) gets to the fucking point, with Chris Martin and Matthew Reid-Schwartz’s guitars and Lucy Atkinson’s rocking the bass with exceptional girth and velocity. Barrett Wilke’s drums power the tracks with metronomic punchiness. “Drink Up and Be Somebody”—which could be main songwriter Martin’s half-joking ethos—is the Kinski composition most likely to instigate mosh pits and fights.

While most of the album’s seven songs are vocal-free, their surges and swerves contain memorable contours, guitars and bass merging into dazzling blurs of comet trail. Kinski don’t need no stinkin’ choruses. (Even though “Operation Negligee” does approach a thorny kind of radio-friendliness that could’ve graced the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Darklands.) The 12-minute closer, “Bulletin of the International String Figure Association,” deviates from everything else on 7 (or 8), fusing Slint-like post-rock complexity with Terry Riley-esque meditativeness, and harking back to more experimental releases like Don’t Climb On and Take the Holy Water. Overall, 7 (or 8) makes for a dynamic companion piece with 2013’s Cosy Moments.

After the jump, Chris Martin talks about the new record, the ups and downs of Kinsk’s long career, optimal pre-show beers, the art of titling songs, John Cassavetes, opening for Tool, and penis size.

The Stranger: Does the title 7 (Or 8) refer to your penis size in inches?

Martin: How’d you know? No, then we’d have to call it 12 (or 13).

But seriously, I count eight or nine albums in your catalog. Were you drunk when you named the record?

We had a bunch of titles. The cover is so strong and evocative of itself that whatever titles we put on seemed to comment on the cover too much. A title didn’t work. We were going to call it Kinski, because we’ve never had an eponymous title, but it seemed like a cop-out. So we said, "Let’s just call it, Led Zeppelin-style, like 7 or 8." And we all disagreed on how many records we have. Some are improv… I just count the official rock records.

That’s funny, because your best records are the improv ones.

[laughs] You think so? I thought you liked Be Gentle with the Warm Turtle the best. We put out quite a few improv or weird things; no one ever buys those. People go, "I hate when you guys are just droning for 45 minutes." You can’t win.

What is the rationale behind the cover image of 7 (Or 8)?

We always try to have cool covers. We don’t know a lot of fine artists; I don’t know why. So I’m always on the lookout for something interesting. I was looking at weird blogs and I stumbled on that picture of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. They just look so young and incredible. It’s so evocative and different from anything we’ve done before. I asked Kill Rock Stars what they thought, because we’d have to get the rights to it. The rights weren’t that expensive and they liked it, so they said they’d do it. I’m a big fan of Cassavetes and what he was about—taking big-time film roles to pay for his really personal films. Some of his movies are boring, but some are incredible, like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I like his aesthetic more than anything.

What were the advantages of working with Phil Manley on the new album?

He was in Oneida for a year or two. When we toured with Oneida a long time ago, we just hit it off. I think he’s a great musician. I love his Life Coach record so much. He’s a real fun, casual guy and he’d just opened this studio in San Francisco [El Studio]. We knew what we wanted to do with this one. We produced this ourselves, in a way. We did some demo-ing here in town. We just thought it would be fun to go to San Francisco and try out Phil's new space. We knew we were on the same wavelength tastewise. So we spent nine days there.

Do you think Manley made a difference, compared to your other records, or were you so in control that it didn't really matter who was producing?

This one sounds more like us, in a way. Phil didn't color the record a lot. It was sort of Albini-style, capturing the way the band was sounding. We didn't even bring our amps down. He knew what we were looking for. He had the gear arranged for us. We knew the material pretty well. We knew what we were going for. We didn't want it to be colored too much by a producer. We've worked with Randall Dunn on a bunch of records, and he's great, obviously, but he has a certain sound. He always gets his fingers in there quite a bit. Sometimes you want that, sometimes you don't.

Kinski have been around for 17 years. What motivates you now to keep grindin’ in the studio and on the live circuit? Do you feel like you have the same fire in your bellies as when you were starting out?

I feel like we got it back. We really struggled for a while with some personal issues about six or seven years ago. It was unclear whether we could keep going. We kind of powered through that stuff and we’re having as much fun, or more now, playing shows than we ever have. We stopped worrying about a career and trying to get ahead. We need to get on this tour, we need to place a song on a TV show. It got to the point where we said, "Fuck it." We’ve been doing this so long, it’s either going to happen or it’s not. Let’s just have fun. Once that [attitude] kicked in, everything got a lot more relaxed and the band became a lot more fun.

I last interviewed Kinski in 2005, when Alpine Static was about to come out. How do you view the last 10 years of the band, in a nutshell? Do you feel like you had one shot at stardom while on Sub Pop, and it didn't happen. Do you regret anything?

We never thought we had a shot at stardom. Well, maybe we did, but I don't know how much Sub Pop did. We were an instrumental band for the most part, but there were a couple of songs per album with vocals. People always pigeonholed us. They're primarily an instrumental band. Yeah, except for the three songs with vocals. Yeah, we could've made some different choices, but we've gotten to do some cool things.

We set some goals for what we wanted to do musically. I see three records as accomplishing that. One was Be Gentle with the Warm Turtle, which was sort of to see if we could do the drone-rock thing. Alpine Static was our riff-y record. And now it's about writing pop songs. I put up 7 (or 8) as one of my favorites. It would've been nice to have more success, but I can't complain.

“Drink Up and Be Somebody,” sounds like the the quintessential Chris Martin title.

[laughs] I got that reputation, huh? I like a cocktail now and then.

I've witnessed some profoundly drunken performances.

Oh, you ain't seen nothing.

Describe your song-titling process. You have some of the best in the business: “Daydream Intonation,” “There’s Nothing Sexy About Time,” “All Your Kids Have Turned to Static,” “Argentina Turner,” “Punching Goodbye Out Front.”

It used to be just going out to bars and shooting the shit with friends. Somebody would say something or I or Lucy would say a funny phrase and I would write it down on a napkin or a matchbook and throw it in an envelope until we needed titles. As we've gotten older, we all go out way less to bars and stuff. So whenever I hear some phrase, I write it in the phone. Normally, there are 50-75 to work from and I listen to the songs and think which fits what musically—even though it's pretty esoteric, as you can tell from the “Detroit Trickle Down” thing.

What’s the story behind “Detroit Trickle Down”? Did someone in the Motor City piss on you?

No. We love Detroit. We don't always have the greatest shows there, but we were good friends with that band Paik. We used to hang out at their space. They're not really a band anymore. This last tour, we weren't going to play Detroit. You know that bowling alley place? [Martin's referencing Garden Bowl, below the Majestic Theatre.] They have a big room upstairs. They had the Black Angels playing upstairs. We got this big guarantee, but they wanted us to play downstairs as people were walking out after the Black Angels played, which seems sort of humiliating and ridiculous. But we did it anyway, because we were on tour and needed the money. It was the Detroit trickle down of people coming out of the Black Angels show, the ones who wanted to hang around and watch more music. It actually turned out fun.

Kinski did open for Tool. Do you consider that a career highlight?

Not exactly, because that was the height of our personal problems within the band, literally in those couple of months. We had a week to decide whether we were going to do that. Emotionally, that was kind of a weird time. That was never anybody's goal—to go on a tour with Tool. I didn't even really know Tool at all at the time. How do you say no to playing to 15-20,000 people a night?

That was for a month. Those guys are awesome. The crew and everyone treated us great. But it was a total mindfuck. On the positive side, I don't think we'll never get seriously nervous about anything again, because you can't get more nervous than that. To go out to a hostile audience that has no idea that there's even an opener... The tickets would say 8 o'clock and the places were full at 8 o'clock. 15,000 people expecting Tool. But it went a lot better than expected. We sort of won 'em over every night, but it was a battle. We got this weird confidence from that. [This was 2007. Kinski had just recorded Down Below It's Chaos, but it had not been released.]

Do you have a best Tool story?

We're not strip-club people by any means, but we'd go to them because we had so much adrenaline and just sitting in a quiet bar felt weird. So we kept ending up in these strip clubs, which was super bizarre. We were so nervous the first night of that tour, just crazy with nerves, but the show went all right. We got paid cash. It was a lot of money. [Bassist] Lucy [Atkinson] had put it in the hotel room and then we went out to drink and went to the first strip club of the tour. By the time we all had had a few drinks, she thought she'd left all the money in the strip club on the floor under a table. That wasn't the case, so it all worked out. The Tool guys are pretty straight and calm, so there wasn't a lot of partying on their end.

Which beer is optimal for rocking in a Kinski-esque manner?

[Without hesitation] Heineken®. Every town in America has got it, so you just ask for that and you're safe. Nobody wants an IPA or a porter when they're going to play a show. You just want a case of Heineken®. It's light and tastes pretty good, but it's not Coors Light or some garbage. It's right in the middle.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about being in a rock group—some advice you could pass on to younger bands?

Do the business stuff you need to do, don't let things slack and do get back to people. But don't worry about shit, either. Whatever happens is gonna happen. Send the music out to whoever you want to help you, but leave it at that and just play shows. I wish I didn't get so worked up over the years, worrying about where we were at as a band—the day-to-day logistics of a band, not the music part.

Tell us a secret about Acid Mothers Temple. [They're a Japanese psych group who've often toured with Kinski; both groups released a very good split LP on Sub Pop].

I don't know if it's a secret, but [leader] Kawabata Makoto has more records than anybody I've ever seen. And I know a lot of people with crazy record collections, but his is absolutely insane. He has a section of just modern composers like Stockhausen that's as big as my whole collection. Just that. He once told me, "The shows aren't any good unless we can record shop beforehand. We always need to find record shop before show."

Are you going to do any covers at your record-release show?

We had a bunch we've been doing for years and we finally laid 'em down to tape a couple of months ago. There were like five covers. We've been doing them for years. Swell Maps, a Love as Laughter song I love called "Old Gold." Those are gonna come out sometime, but I don't know when. We haven't had any time to get any new covers together. I kind of want to do a Stranglers song, but I don't know which one.

Kinski's album-release party happens tonight at Chop Suey, with Fungal Abyss and Gold Fronts.