Less than two weeks shy of the March 31st release date of their 5th album, Living Thing, Peter Morén, Björn Yttling and John Eriksson -- collectively, and more simply known as Peter Bjorn and John -- performed their first show on U.S. soil in over a year, at The W Hotel's Wonderlust Live concert in New York on Tuesday night. The trio performed their can't-get-this-whistling-out-of-my-head hit song, "Young Folks" with Au Revoir Simone's Heather D'Angelo to a crowd that included the likes of Julia Stiles. Before the set, Peter and John dished about the new album -- a hefty, full-course meal, complete with dessert -- and other ideas on the back burner, which may or may not include a song about cheese doodles, and possibly even a rap record.

As a group you've said that you make good music “for your own amusement.” What amuses you exactly? John Eriksson: Surprises Peter Morén: Yeah, surprises and layers of stuff. You can find new things in a song when you listen to it the 2nd time, 3rd, 4th and, 5th time, so there should be good stuff in everything, from the rhythm to the lyric. The whole thing should be super, so we try to put surprises in every detail.

Has your reason for making music changed at all since you started out? PM: Not really, but I think that we have and will continue to grow no matter what. If we didn’t have music, we still would have evolved in the same way, but the good thing now is that we can actually focus just on music and we don’t have to have other jobs. JE: The taste develops as long as you keep on searching for new things and are opened minded, it’s like a restaurant, you get better and better at what you do and you can create more and more personal stuff. You learn how the potato works, how to make the perfect dressing etc, so we’re getting better and better. PM: It’s all about food and making it medium rare, that’s important, a bit bloody. JE: This new record has 12 songs and it’s like the 12 best steaks you’ve ever had.

What about the sides? Are there different sides with every steak? JE: There really are, and it’s not what you’d expect. PM: Some of them are very spicy actually. JE: Then some are like ice cubes that taste like blueberry. PM: Like popsicles.

What’s your favorite track, or steak, on the new album, Living Thing? PM: It differs from day to day. It’s really hard to choose, because it’s all over the place – it’s very coherent and it fits well together -- but there are still a lot of different flavors. But personally I really like the last 4 songs, which are all mellow, softer, melancholic ballads. I think that the songs from number 9 through 12 are the best stuff we’ve ever done, just because of the way they fit together and the order that they’re in.

What’s the message behind the songs, what inspired you? JE: Ghost Houses. It’s true. It’s that feeling of when you’re in a ghost house and you don’t know what will happen, when you open a door you could see a mirror and someone will jump out at you, but then you get out of the ghost house with a happy feeling and a little bit of adrenaline -- that feeling in your stomach, your heart, and your brain. PM: Yeah, it’s a little bit about everything; it’s like life you know? We write about everything. So its not like we sit down and say, “Lets do a theme record.” It’s more like an ensemble of songs that you have and you think about what songs would fit the record although you might have written them five years ago. But then it often ends up fitting well together anyway, because we just always write about what happens.

Are you teaching a lesson or just sharing your personal experiences? PM: We’re teaching ourselves lessons! But we’re also sharing personal things that often reflect what other people go through, so everyone can relate to it really. Then sometimes we try to do more story-telling, fairytale style stuff too. There’s a song called “Blue Period Picasso,” which is really just a story that I wrote and later put to music. It’s about a painting coming to life and falling in love with a visitor at a museum -- so that’s kind of a new, surrealistic turn. And we’ll probably do more of that. JE: I’m making a song right now about a Cheese Doodle.

A regular cheese doodle or the fiery hot cheese doodle? JE: It’s the regular one, because it’s more fun to explore their minds.

When can we expect it to be released? JE: I think I’m going to keep it for my solo project.

Your videos are interesting, especially the new one “Nothing to Worry About” What’s the though process behind it, are you just trying to have fun with it? PM: Our first and foremost rule is not being in the video – for this album anyway. We tried to do that and it helps us because we don’t have to spend a lot of time shooting the video. So for that song we actually just handed it over to a director that we respect and that we know does good stuff, Andreas Nielson, who does a lot of work with The Knife. We just let him go to Japan with his brother, where he found this gang -- so it’s not actors, it’s the real deal – and they go out dancing on the weekends to rockabilly music and fix their hair and all that.

Does the video necessarily have to relate to the song or does it just have to be entertaining? JE: It’s a thing of its’ own and I love when videos show something different. It could be a story, because it’s its own art-form, and if it works together with the music, which rarely happens, it’s fantastic. I think our videos do that, but you can still see them as their own little thing, so we're going to try to continue on that path.

“Young Folks” is your most popular song of all time, even if people don’t know they know it, they’ve heard it somewhere, in a video game or something. Are you sick of that already? JE: When you notice it by yourself, like when you hear it on a T.V. show with Danish dogs jumping over obstacles, then you get happy, like “that’s our song!"

Hip-Hop arts like Kanye West, and most recently Drake have done samples of your songs. Have you heard the tracks? PM: We just heard Drake’s recently. It was pretty funny.

Would you ever collaborate with a hip-hop artist? PM: Yeah, it would work well. The stuff that hip-hoppers sample is a lot of old soul and funk and stuff that I love, so we are totally sample-able. We actually had a rap song for this record that didn’t make the cut…because I rapped so badly. So we’re going to try again for a later record.

What artists do you guys love right now? JE: We’ll recommend some Swedish stuff that you should check out: Jenny Wilson, The Knife’s singer Karin Andersson has a new album called Fever Ray that’s really good, Holiday for Strings, PM: There’s also a guy called Existenz Minimum who has a new album called “Okay Boris” which is amazing, it’s kind of melancholic pop rock, it’s got a distinct, world-of-its’-own sound. JE: All of these bands are this futuristic but still classic sound. PM: Retro-futurist, I like to call it.

Are you mostly influenced by other Swedish artists? PM: Nope, we’re just going to plug them right now. I think for this record, Living Thing, we actually didn’t listen to a lot of new music, we mostly dug in the past. It’s funny because it sounds modern and kind of fresh and new, but there was maybe one new thing we listened to, it's mostly 80s stuff and older – from 50s rockabilly and folk music to funk, R&B and early hip-hop synth-pop, and some punk stuff -- we like the oldies! JE: A good tip is to go to a record store with vinyls and just find good-looking covers that make an impression on you. That’s going to be my thing now.