Anastasia Dimou and Feathers, courtesy Roger Kisby.

Two years after leaving New York City – her home town – to settle in Austin, there are still aspects of her new environment that Anastasia Dimou refuses to pick up.

“I don’t say ‘y’all’ – I won’t do that,” says Dimou, who left her previous New York band, the PJ Harvey-influenced Cruel Black Dove, for the more wide open pastures of Texas and started airy, moody electronic project Feathers with friends. The band, which is drawing comparisons to new-wavers such as Depeche Mode and The Cure, opens for Blouse and Social Studies on Saturday at Bottom of the Hill.

“It’s easy and conducive to creation,” says Dimou about why she chose Austin as her home base. She also had friends in town, which helped put Feathers on the road, and Texas has other benefits: “I’ve become addicted to tacos. I have tacos daily.”

Cruel Black Dove was not an unsuccessful band. She and co-founder Alan Veucasovic built buzz online and had songs picked up for television. Songwriting duties were split 50-50, and Veucasovic handled all of the production.

“During Cruel Black Dove, I was starting to write more on my own,” she says. “I started getting better at doing it. On our second EP, I had actually written a bunch of material myself, but it was always produced by him.”

As her skills with song creation expanded, Dimou decided she wanted to have more production input. This is when she started laying the groundwork for Feathers. She chose the name not because she wanted to stick with an aviary theme, but because she liked how it sounded and didn’t want to go by her name – she didn’t want to be thought of solely as a singer-songwriter when she longed to do much more.

“The (Feathers) record was my first foray into doing everything myself. I recorded it myself (and) I produced most of the tracks myself.”

After moving to Austin, Dimou introduced the Feathers songs to several friends, including bassist Cortney Voss, keyboardist Kathleen Carmichael and drummer Jon Minor, who will complete the four-piece that performs in San Francisco Saturday. There are several other alternating members, including guitarists Destiny Montague and Alex Gehring.

“(I) got the whole record together, and I showed that to the ladies,” Dimou says. “They liked it and wanted to get on board. So we started sorting out how to do the live show.”

While the songs are Dimou’s, the other band members introduce their own elements through the live show, which means the performances vary by the musicians on stage.

Dimou doesn’t rule out a more collaborative record in the future, or a return to Cruel Black Dove, either.

“We’re all really good friends … so I would never say never,” she says. “Alan…just did our second video for us. But everybody’s got their own thing going on right now.”

In March, Dimou and her band were invited to open for her heroes and inspiration Depeche Mode at South by Southwest. After Feathers’ debut album, If All Now Here, was released in May, many began referring to them as the “female Depeche Mode.”

That is a huge compliment to Dimou, even though she’s not entirely sure how true it is. Like Dave Gahan and his band, Feathers makes airy, shimmering, dance pop with dark lyrics.

“They write songs that really speak to people (and) they have beautiful melodies,” Dimou says. “If I could even come close to that in the future, I’d be really psyched.”

Q&A: Anastasia Dimou on a childhood spent riding donkeys in Greece

Why did you move to Austin and quit your previous band (Cruel Black Dove)?

Anastasia Dimou: New York is great for when you have a record done; for getting the record out, because it’s very social and you can get the word out. It’s hard to make music there because there’s so many distractions. The main reason for me was change. It’s funny, in all the stories that I see, it latches onto the fact that I left New York, and it kind of makes me feel like I’m bagging on New York. I love New York, and I’m from New York. It’s just a matter of leaving what you’re familiar with … and having a place where you can really focus.

You spent part of your childhood living in Greece because your father’s side of the family lives there. What was that time like for you, and at what point did you did you get into music?

Anastasia Dimou: It was really amazing for me. I would be put on a plane at, like, 10 years old, by myself, to visit my family for a full summer – the last day of school until we went back to school – in a small, small village in Greece that only had, like, two telephones. It was really eye-opening, and I spent my summers in that old-world village as opposed to playing video games or playing with Brat dolls or something. I would be riding donkeys, or whatever. It expanded my universe. I listened to a lot of Greek music. It was a whole untapped world for me. Not that Greek music has totally influenced Feathers. It’s definitely something I wish I could foray into somehow.

Follow Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.