“I was surprised to realize that it’s fall. It’s fall, right? Mid-September is fall, right?” AFI frontman Davey Havok asks. It’s true we’re in L.A., where the only way to know summer has ended is by post-awards shows chatter and the number of gifting suites. But even if AFI were being pelted with snowballs thrown by Frosty himself, Havok would have no clue what time of year it was. “You get very involved in writing and recording a record, and it really makes you lose track of everything,” he says.

Havok’s confusion is understandable. The entire band has been in the midst of a time vacuum for more than a year, writing and recording Crash Love, the album faced with the ominous prospect of following their breakthrough effort, Decemberunderground. Though the Ukiah, CA, band formed back in 1991, and released their first album in 1995, it wasn’t until 2006 that they released the hit single “Miss Murder,” which propelled Decemberunderground to a number one debut on the Billboard Top 200.

So 15 years after forming, AFI finally hit the top of the charts. Now they just have to do it again. No pressure. “We do what we’ve always done, and we’ve made music for ourselves first,” drummer Adam Carson says as he and Havok sit in the restaurant of a trendy Sunset Strip hotel. “That’s really the litmus test. If it does something for us, if it excites us, if it moves us, if it makes us feel something, then we can present it to the world. And hopefully it gets the reaction. And if it doesn’t, fuck it—at least we like it.”

Crash Love is getting the desired response from critics, earning them some of the best reviews of their career. And it’s easy to see why. Whether it’s the heavy rock of the anthem-like “Beautiful Thieves,” the catchy-as-hell infectious pop of “Veronica Sawyer Smokes,” the fast-paced no-bullshit rock of the first single, “Medicate,” the Adam and the Ants meets garage pop of “Too Shy to Scream,” or the tension-filled midtempo ballad “Okay, I Feel Better Now”—a song that explodes into its pulsating chorus—Crash Love finds the group showing off its growing versatility and maturity.

After a year-plus of writing and recording, the band entered the studio with a huge catalog of songs to choose from. “As we’re working the songs out, some of them we kind of explore and we like where they go, but then eventually they don’t really get there and we sort of drop them,” Carson says. “But sometimes—and usually they’re my favorite songs—they sound great immediately and it’s almost as if everybody in the band already knew what they were supposed to do, and the first time through it just gels.”

So out of the songs on the album, how many fell into the latter category? “I guess you look at those 50 or something songs that we wrote, or 60—generally those 12. A lot of the songs [on the album] have that reaction. Those are the ones, just because they demand attention.”

Havok claims it all began with “Beautiful Thieves.” “[It] was the first song we wrote where Jade and I sat down and it was very clear, with that one, it was the best song for us,” he says. “We had the same experience with ‘Veronica Sawyer Smokes.’ When Jade started playing that jangly guitar part, that melody came to me immediately and it was so natural and it was very different for us, which was very exciting for me. Adam and I definitely had a moment when we were playing ‘Cold Hands’ last night, where we were both looking at each other and thinking, Yeah.”