Alpinism, the high-end headphones-necessitating debut album from School Of Seven Bells, is so awash in ghostly keyboard waves, otherworldly harmonies and other hyper-layered sonic textures that even its creators refer to as "glassy." "We've had people say "icy," admits guitarist Ben Curtis. Presumably it was no accident that the space-pop platter was named after a synonym for mountain climbing, simultaneously one of the most bone-chilling pursuits imaginable and a lofty symbol for man's desire to defy his earthly shackles.

Conversely, the School members (Curtis and twin sisters Claudia and Alejandra Deheza) are as down to earth and warm as their music is dreamlike and interstellar. They also have a lot of opinions about parenting. While strolling around a park in their Brooklyn neighborhood, Curtis is being menaced by a hyperactive tyke that threatens to kick anyone daring to walk by the monkey bars he's claimed as his kingdom. Later, while walking to a neighborhood bar for a chat, Curtis (clad in black, just like the rest of his band mates) notes that he's read that it's often the aggressive children that end up the most bullied, while the Deheza sisters express bewilderment at the young man's uncalled for outbursts. But for all the group's bemusement, they can also sympathize. For although the members of School Of Seven Bells have logged time in notable bands before, they had a lot of growing up to do before they could make their debut album. And it wasn't always easy.

Raised in South Florida, the Deheza sisters "started singing before we could talk," says Claudia. Their father was an opera singer who later worked in radio, and Claudia remembers there were always musical instruments and recording equipment around the house for his daughters to play with. What's more, "we grew up in a very, almost kind of fanatical, evangelical church-going household," Claudia says. "Not like snake holders or anything, just your typical Latino evangelical church. Everyone has a tambourine, everyone has a maraca, everyone has something to make noise with."

Their interest in music would eventually grow to include everything from playing brass in the school band to an appreciation for Miami's bass-heavy club scene. Eventually, the sisters moved to New York City—"South Florida didn't have the pace that I needed," says Alejandra—and formed the moody indie-rock group On!Air!Library! A year after the release of their 2004 self-titled debut, Library! was invited to tour with NYC standard bearers, Interpol. It was on that tour that the sisters first met Curtis, an Oklahoma-born guitarist who had moved to New York to play in the neo-psychedelic trio Secret Machines alongside his older brother. "It's funny because I'd actually never heard Secret Machines, even though living in New York you hear everybody," Alejandra says. "And they even lived [here] which was so weird."

Though Curtis had never heard of On! Air! Library! either, "there was just something electric about the interactions we had," he says. "I think maybe, spiritually the seed for School of Seven Bells was planted then, but we didn't really do anything together until about two and a half years later. We just kind of went our separate ways, and it was just kind of like this synchronous moment when we realized that we could potentially have this most exciting thing in our lives." Cutis went on to record another album with The Secret Machines, 2006's Ten Silver Drops, while On! Air! Library! broke up. "I just knew I had to do something else, I didn't know what, but I knew I needed to work it out in my head," Claudia says. "I knew I wanted to write differently." The feeling was mutual. "During that Interpol tour," Curtis says, "Alejandra talked to me about School of Seven Bells... I totally raised my hand. That's when the seed was planted. So in early 2007 it was like, 'Let's do this.'

Though Curtis says it was hard leaving his brother's band, he got early encouragement that he was on the right track. He e-mailed Claudia some loops he had made, "just like three beats happening over and over again." Claudia sent him files back, and Alejandra began working on a complementary part for the song. (Strangely, the sisters say they rarely harmonized together in a band setting before School started.) "It was just made for each other," Curtis says. "It was really harmonic and really weird, and all of a sudden we had this song (later titled "Connjur") and we were just really shocked."

The rest of the process wouldn't quite be so felicitous. The group was determined not to rest on the laurels of past achievements and instead earn their own fanbase. But it took them several tours and two tries at their debut album before they could learn how to be the band they wanted to be. "I think we had an idea of what School Of Seven Bells sounded like," Curtis says, "and we hadn't really expressed that correctly until this album. I had just been in this world where what you do is, you have a band and you make up your parts and you record your record and that's your band. I think it's really a suffocating way to work. To me it's more fun to have everyone kind of spill everything out on the table and you just kind of shape this music out of it. It took me a while to learn how to do that, how to lose the kind of fetters of making this type of music."

One of those fetters was the extra musicians the group used to tour with. They joke that having a live rhythm section added an aggression that they didn't necessarily desire. "Not to knock anyone else that we ever played music with," Alejandra says, "but it wasn't the sound we wanted with other people involved." After several tours with the added players, Claudia says they decided to strip the group back to the original members. "I think that was the first thing we decided, that we didn't want to compromise the beats." Since the downsizing, the group plays electronic drum parts through their sound system when they perform.

These days, School Of Seven Bells follows the model popularized by Radiohead and the Flaming Lips, were members do not necessarily serve as musicians with a designated instrument, but rather a collection of writers and producers more concerned with a sonic goal than rigid roles based around who plays what. Starting with small fragments of music and vocal ideas, all of the members play guitar or keyboards, and then sample and manipulate the live performance until they are, as Curtis says, divorced from reality and doing "things with other instruments that they wouldn't normally be doing," Curtis says, with the ultimate goal to create "a world around the vocals and the harmonies."

The group signed with Ghostly International, but pulled the album they recorded just before they were about to deliver it. Feeling that the original still wasn't their correct version, they scrapped it and re-recorded it by themselves in their home studio in three weeks. Curtis says that while learning how to produce the album they were careful not to over-produce it. (He estimates that there were about three albums worth of sounds they removed from the final product.) "We turn off a lot of things," Curtis says. "You have to be careful when you add. Are you really prepared to lessen the importance of every other sound in the mix? You have to find that right balance."

Finding the right balance, of course, seems to be the group's defining quest thus far. "It sounds like this crazy internal struggle," admits Curtis, "and I don't know why we were having it, but for some reason we just had this battle with ourselves to make the kind of music we wanted to make. I think what we really wanted though was a record that we could hand to anybody we knew and be like, 'Check this out, this is what we do and we can vouch for every second on it.' We've made enough records that we know that's really rare."

www.schoolofsevenbells.com

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