A house can become too small for an expanding family. Twins Max and Spencer Ernst and Spencer’s wife, Chelsea Lee, had lived together in Washington, D.C. for several years as their band, SHAED, exploded with hit single “Trampoline” in 2018.

When the pandemic arrived, Lee and Spencer moved in with Lee’s parents, while Max got his own place. In 2022, the couple welcomed a daughter, June, while Max got a puppy, Christina, with his partner, Quinn. These days, they’re living 20 minutes away from each other: Max downtown and Spencer and Lee in the suburbs outside the city.

“We still spend five days a week together,” Max says during a video call, his brother at his side and his sister-in-law separately at her home.

SHAED has a lot going on now as the trio, having left their label, prepares to release its third album, Spinning Out. And when Lee and the Ernsts eventually play shows again, fans will discover this family is still growing, as—surprise!—Lee and Spencer are once again expecting.

“I’m very pregnant. I’m due in August. So, impeccable timing,” Lee says while answering a question about navigating the touring life with one child, let alone another incoming. “We have a ton of shows coming up. … Of course, there’s June. I’m still trying to figure out what that looks like. It certainly won’t hold us back from doing anything, and thankfully, our families live very close, and we’ll just make it work. You gotta make it work.”

The new album is about the changes, both good and unnerving ones in the trio’s lives, such as leaving their prior label as well as management company, moving into new homes and, as Spencer describes it, starting all over again.

“At the beginning, there was a lot of uneasiness, sort of trying to land on our feet, not really knowing where we were with everything,” Spencer says. “There were just a lot of new feelings that we were having and trying to put that into the music and be honest. … The last album [2021’s High Dive] was anxiety driven. There was some of that on this record, but we are feeling a lot more settled in some ways.”

It explores familial themes—the responsibilities of parenting are huge here—as well as the heaviness of one’s mortality; it’s not unusual for parents to imagine a world in which their children don’t have them to lean on anymore. In all, it’s a collection of snapshots in an album of memories that dig much deeper than the band’s last few years.

And it all started with the title track, which Spencer says the three wrote from the perspective of having everything they thought they wanted but still feeling unsettled. They recorded the song live, together in Max’s house. He played piano. Spencer was in another room on acoustic guitar. Lee sang in a spare bedroom.

“My house is not big, by the way, so it was very cramped quarters, and we had the A/C off. I think it was in the summer,” Max says, before Lee chimes in: “I must have lost 10 pounds of pure sweat because it was so hot in this room.”

That’s more or less how SHAED started out making music, while their more recent music was more electronic in nature. Spinning Out incorporates a lot more organic instrumentation. Spencer calls the experience “inspiring.”

SHAED previewed the new album with first single “Everybody Knows I’m High,” which acts as a bridge between the previous record, both in its moody synth-pop production and the anxiety-riddled theme of feeling like everyone is staring at you. It’s also the one song on the album that the band wrote while on a monthlong songwriting trip to L.A., with collaborators Tommy English (Børns) and Jeremy Hatcher (Harry Styles). Toward the end, they got antsy about getting back home.

“We were just feeling … very out of place, and not like ourselves,” Max says, explaining they wanted to convey the feeling in a way that others could understand.

The psychedelic song about the feeling that everyone is staring at you has callbacks to “Alice in Wonderland” that are matched in its surreal video, which includes a puppet rabbit.

Then there’s more whimsical tunes like “You Stole My Favorite Song,” which is about how Lee can’t listen to Phoenix’s “1901” because the song is connected to a boy she dated in high school.

“Years later, I can listen to it, but now I have to think about that person the entire time. It’s [2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix] such a great album, too. I’m so bummed,” she says.

SHAED wrote cathartic piano ballad “Rocket in the Sky,” the second single, about June and what it feels like to become parents, with feelings of pure joy and the mundane sacrifices in parents’ lives when time becomes scarce.

Lee has known she wanted to name her first daughter “June” since she found it in a book of poetry from the 1880s at her parents’ home, in a poem about how June transitions spring to summer. It helped that Lee’s birthday is that month.

“When Spencer and I first started dating, I basically told him, ‘We’re gonna name our first daughter June, and you don’t have a choice,” she said, laughing.

“Her middle name is River, and one of our favorite songs is ‘Moon River,’” Spencer adds.

Joy is not a binary emotion on Spinning Out. Love and parenthood carry much more weight as a result of the band to be completely honest with the members’ thoughts. The title track is one example of this heaviness. Album opener “We Live We Die,” which channels ‘60s folk rock, is another. The band wrote that one shortly after June was born.

“They sang the first verse of the song, what they kind of had, and the lyrics just hit me so hard,” Max says, quoting the entire first verse from memory: “I remember the day so well/ Sitting in the back of the van/ Holding hands ‘til we cried/ ‘Cause we realized we’re here/ We live and we die/ And we say goodbye forever, and we never come back/ But there’s still a chance, my dear, that there’s something better.”

When he first heard it, he started thinking about how lucky the three were to be making music as a family and as best friends, despite the various challenges they’ve had over the years.

“It sounds super depressing, but the way that Chelsea was singing it, and the way that it had a hopeful of message at the end; I just remember tearing up when I heard it,” Max says.

The message might sound dark, but SHAED also views it as hopeful for an afterlife where loved ones can always be together.

“I think that the idea of death is really interwoven in all the songs that we write,” Lee says. “‘Trampoline’ was basically a song about our fear of dying and trying to put a positive spin on that. Now that we have a daughter, it’s like, ‘Oh, gosh!’ It’s so much more real, this idea of death.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.