Nobody ever accused Meric Long of being too decisive. “Sad, but it’s not; maybe just for a moment,” he humbly coos on the ambient, reserved introduction to “Joe’s Waltz,” just one verse before driving into the angular, violent whirlwind of action and reform that closes the song. The vocalist and guitarist for the acoustic-pop group the Dodos writes songs that waft loneliness and desperation, all the while bursting with confidence and liveliness—oftentimes within the same eight bars of music. The Dodos fearlessly twisted and dragged each song on 2008’s Visiter to its most strenuous, uncomfortable limit. They just couldn’t be helped.

But when the record was finally consumed and critics applauded the duo for their inventive zeal, the two changed everything again—becoming three by adding Keaton Snyder on vibraphone and working with producer Phil Ek (the Shins, Fleet Foxes) for their more lush follow-up, 2009’s Time to Die.

“The lushness was not completely intentional,” Long confided. “I think Phil definitely had a big part in that, and that’s what we wanted. We wanted him to kind of take the lead and sort of work his magic.”

Underneath it all, though, Long contends that the songs are the same; it’s just a matter of volume levels. “In some of the earlier recordings, there’s an energy there, but some of the things get drowned out from the drums. There was just sort of a shift in what we wanted to showcase in the band.”

Far be it for them to stick too closely to that decision, though: What the band chooses to showcase on an album is not necessarily what they hope to showcase in a live setting. “We try to approach the record differently from our live show,” Long explained.

So where the Dodos on Time to Die sounded entirely fleshed-out and meditated on production, the Dodos who play the Orpheum Theater Wednesday night might sound more instrumentally dynamic and more, um, aggressive. “The core of what the band does, I think, centers around Logan’s drumming and my guitar playing … It’s like somebody hammering your head with a sledgehammer [laughs].”

The slightly re-arranged songs from Time to Die won’t be the only ones that might sound foreign to fans, either. “We kind of took this tour as an opportunity to perform a lot of new material,” Long said.

The Dodos already have a genre-stretching sound, but according to Long, the new songs sound different still. “Right now, the new material we’re playing is pretty groove-heavy… That’s a horrible way to describe it, but it’s the only way I can think of.”

In a few short weeks, Long and Co. will head back to the studio to put some of that new material—whatever it sounds like—on record. But as you would expect, nothing about the forthcoming album is fully decided yet, neither the producer nor the intended direction.

“We’re not sure if [Ek] will be involved yet, but we’re basically approaching it ourselves,” Long said. “It’s actually pretty open-ended … We’ve just committed to doing a bunch of recordings, so we’ll see what happens.”

And don’t even bother asking what they’re thinking of naming it.

At this point, the only thing that is entirely certain is the Dodos’ technically advanced musicianship, their on-stage tenacity and their dedication to constantly challenging themselves. Each live show undergoes the same scrutiny as their songs, brimming with vigor and bursting with gusto, whether you hear it on their record or not. In other words, their live show is definitely worth the price of admission—no matter what they decide to do with it.