Like a pre-teen maturing faster with every passing year, Of Montreal has gone from gay parades and bedside dramas to satanic panic and hissing fauna in less time than it takes to grow chin stubble and chest hair. And like all freewheeling youths, the Athens, Ga., band was bound for disillusionment on Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (Polyvinyl). The crushing wake-up call comes on “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal,” a pulsing, 12-minute groove that sends sobering shockwaves throughout this otherwise fanciful 10th full-length. “Let’s just have some fun,” pleads Kevin Barnes, unconvincingly, midway through the song’s Sisyphean ascent before he levels with us: “Let’s tear the shit apart/ Let’s tear the fucking house apart/Let’s tear our fucking bodies apart.” Though its Studio 54 flittering and Barry Gibb-borrowed falsettos may suggest otherwise, Fauna is Of Montreal’s first heartbroken record, an inexorable comedown from years spent gleefully raping the muses. But the emotional gravitas only lends heft to the group’s exhilarating, ever-present sugar high.

MAGNET petitioned Barnes for a more scientific breakdown of Fauna’s DNA.

This record is fascinatingly complex, but it’s also incredibly direct.
Definitely. My first record (1997’s Cherry Peel) was a bit more personal, but for the past six or seven records, I went through this phase where I didn’t really want to share as much. But while I was writing Hissing Fauna, all this really heavy stuff was happening to me, and I couldn’t ignore it. So the best way to get through it was to write about it.

At one point you sing, “I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway.” True story?
Yeah. My wife’s Norwegian, so we went over there to have our child. Around that time, for some reason, my mind was just totally falling apart. I was having these serious bouts of depression, anxiety, paranoia ... I couldn’t keep it together at all. When (2005’s) The Sunlandic Twins came out, I was touring so much, and we had this little baby that I was apart from the whole time. I was put in this horrible position: My career was going so well, but at the same time, my personal life was in upheaval. My wife and I were having all these problems because I was on the road.

Are you split up now?
No, we definitely have a relationship. It changed, and in a lot of ways, I think it’s stronger than it was before.

How does she feel about the record?
I think at first she had a hard time dealing with all of our personal information being viewed by all these people.

Are you in a better place because of this whole experience?
Definitely. That, and getting on antidepressants.

Which you also sing about on “Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse.”
That was actually before I got on antidepressants. I was trying everything: drinking, yoga, exercise. I was thinking, “How can I get it together? Is this over? Is my life over?” I didn’t want to die, but I couldn’t stand to live the way that I was; it was dreadful. So that was the idea: You can’t really control the chemicals in your brain, and sometimes there’s nothing you can do to keep it together.

There’s always Scientology.
[Laughs] No way.