Spencer Ernst is glowing when he rejoins his wife Chelsea Lee and his brother Max at his and Lee’s new home in the suburbs of northern Virginia for a video call interview a week prior to releasing High Dive, their first full-length album as SHAED.

“I just got the second shot. Maybe it’s mental, but I feel great,” Spencer says while positioning himself in front of a computer with his family. That leads into a conversation comparing the side effects of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Spencer got the former while Max the latter.

“My second shot wasn’t too bad either, which I felt like was kind of alarming,” he says, comparing notes with the reporter. “Does that mean my immune system, like, sucks?”

Adds Lee, who’s also vaccinated: “It’s definitely given us all a little bit of peace of mind that stuff is kind of getting back to normal.”

Things are looking up for SHAED, but it wasn’t so during the onset of the pandemic, as the Ernst brothers and Lee faced the demons of fear, anxiety and depression—like so many others worldwide—and the effects of all three, such as staying up late and drinking too much.

Right as the world was grinding to a halt, the trio also lost faith in a just-finished album. So SHAED scrapped it completely and looked toward a future where, for the first time in years, they had nothing to share with fans, and seemingly an endless void of lockdowns and the fear of death.

Sound heavy? It was for the band, and eventually it fueled the thematic side of High Dive, a heavy album that glides atop icy synths and beautiful strings.

“It’s definitely been a journey,” Lee says, looking back to a time when the band’s overseas tours were first canceled, forcing the three to take stock of everything they’d been through to that point: The wild success of single “Trampoline” that propelled them to huge stages and up the charts (No. 13 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and No. 4 on the Top 40) and also instilled the fear of becoming a one-hit wonder. This pressure led them to partner with hitmakers to try and replicate the same level of success. In 2019, the three saw their D.C. area home just two weeks in all.

“It just was kind of all over the place, and we realized that it wasn’t really telling our story, and it didn’t really mean much to us anymore,” Lee says.

Moving past the album created anxiety for the trio—especially Lee—for whom anxiety was a preexisting condition. The trio was worried for their parents, for their friends in New York, an early COVID-19 epicenter, and an uncertain future for SHAED.

That led to drinking “way too much just to kind of numb everything,” Lee says. “Drinking for us is not like anything crazy; we are lightweights over here.”

One thing they weren’t nervous about was setting aside all the work they’d done and starting anew. When they started writing again, they worked to capture all of the emotions they have felt during the pandemic.

“It gave us something to throw all of our energy into and distract us from what was going on around us,” Max says. “There was a silver lining to be able to actually have the time to write a full album together over the course of a year. … It really gave us time to get momentum going and find the connecting thread between the album and all the songs and feel like it was a cohesive body of work. We’ve known each other for like 14 years, and this was the first time we ever were able to create a full album together.”

SHAED wrote the album in a room together the same way the trio wrote “Trampoline,” bouncing ideas off each other naturally without outside influence. Lee says the album means so much to her and the Ernst brothers because each song is about them.

Max Ernst calls it a time capsule of the time the band was riding high with success and then had its future put on pause. He says it’s the most honest music he, his brother and Lee have ever written. In addition to writing about the past 18 months, the three also revisited some of the pivotal moments in the band’s relationship.

Having pushed aside the album that had been co-written with songwriting heavyweights provided the freedom to write in the same way that brought SHAED success in the first place.

“We tried to write the follow-up for ‘Trampoline’ for a couple years … but we could never quite get there,” Lee says. “A lot of the pressure was coming from us. We didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder. We wanted to have another song that people were connected with.”

Adds Spencer: “With this new batch of songs, we were really able to pour our hearts and souls into it.”

One of the heaviest songs on High Dive that tackles the band’s sliding mental health and drinking head-on is “Dizzy.” Lee says the three made a concerted effort, on the album as a whole but particularly on the song, to be open with fans.

The trio had lived together for several years, both on the road and off it. Right before the outset of the pandemic, Lee and Spencer Ernst bought their own house in the suburbs, while Max wanted to live closer to downtown Washington, D.C. and found his own home. Before the married couple could move into their new home they stayed for several months with Lee’s parents at the outset of the pandemic. That meant they were separated from Max because of both space and safety concerns.

“We were not feeling complete, as we normally do,” Lee says.

Only after coming together one night did they compare their experiences and found out that each of them was coping with alcohol. The song is about the struggle.

“It was strange because we’d been on the road for two years and then, when we finally were able to get off the road, and all of our friends are in town, and family, we felt more isolated than ever,” Spencer says. “You knew your friends were just a couple miles away, but you couldn’t go see them. That, also, contributed to this feeling of emptiness and just struggling with that isolation.”

Lee’s grandmother lives just five minutes away, and the two met and hugged for the first time in more than a year just one week before this interview.

“It’s just a crazy thing to think about. We are such family people,” Lee says. “We love our families; we see them all the time. Not being able to do what we normally do throughout the year has been really hard for us.”

“Dizzy” also provides another highlight on the record in SHAED’s partnership with FAME’s Project’s Macedonian Symphonic Orchestra, directed over Zoom by string arranger Jherek Bischoff. The band discovered him through his work on Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors.

The band would send him demos with synth-based strings and he would reply with his own ideas. After they found the final arrangements, Bischoff notated the parts for the orchestra. Then, he and the band would join the orchestra via video call early in the morning for recording sessions.

“There’s strings all over the album, but especially on this song, I feel like he really captured that angst and undercurrent of uneasiness with the string progression that he created,” Spencer says. “You would record 12 people playing the same part three times, and then you would have all these different parts of the whole thing, so at the end of the day, we’d have like a 1,000 tracks of strings per song. That was a steep learning curve for us to figure out how to take these take these parts and figure out how to layer them and make it tight with the track. It was super rewarding and we got better over time. … We did all the all the editing all of the editing ourselves.

The newest single is the title track from High Dive. SHAED had just returned from filming the video for the song in L.A. a few days before this interview (followed by a trip to Minnesota to visit the Ernsts’ younger brother).

“The way that we would describe [the video] is it was a “Napoleon-Dynamite”-inspired, ‘80s accident-chasing infomercial lawyers. That was our characters,” Max says. “We dressed up in these pastel suits and in this weird office setting. It was hilariously fun to shoot.”

Lee says she’s not sure whether any song on the record can match the success of “Trampoline” (a version of it with pop singer-songwriter Zayn is also included) but that she has high hopes for “High Dive.”

“Trampoline” was out six months and was just kind of hanging out and then the Apple commercial came along and kind of gave the song like a whole new life,” Max adds. “You never know what is going to be the catalyst for something to take off. The most important thing for us is that we can stand behind the songs, no matter what happens. “Trampoline” wasn’t created in a lab or anything. It was just us three doing what we love to do. [For] this album we just stuck with that mentality and hopefully it pans out.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.