Deer Tick keeps creating fresh sounds

“We’re in the studio and it’s going really well,” Crowell says. “We’ve got about 12 to 14 songs recorded for this and a bunch more that are being written while we still have some studio time.”

The indie rock quintet from Rhode Island is working on a follow-up to its 2011 release, “Divine Providence,” and Crowell expects it to be released later this year.

He says while the band continues to write songs, many of those may end up on an EP to be released after the album.

“We had the same situation with ‘Divine Providence’ where we had too many songs,” he says. “That’s the reason we put an EP together last year and put some of those tracks on there. It’s a way for us to keep our music out there and remain fresh.”

Crowell, along with Ian O’Neil, Dennis Ryan, John McCauley and Chris Ryan, have been making music since 2007 and have become critical darlings in the alt-country world. The band has toured the world and gained fans from all over.

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Its debut album, “War Elephant,” was released in September 2007 and re-released in 2008 with Partisan Records.

In May 2009, due in large part to his love of the song “Dirty Dishes,” “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams featured Deer Tick as the first band profiled on his BriTunes web-based music interview program.

Since then, the band has released three more albums and Crowell says its sound has changed somewhat.

He says with “Divine Providence,” the band strayed a bit from its folk roots and went for something louder and faster paced.

“This seems to be the direction that we’re continuing to follow,” he says. “A lot of the times, the songs come from us just jamming together. Other times, it’s very structured and we all put our stamp on it.”

Crowell says Deer Tick is currently road testing some of the material.

“It’s a funny thing because we don’t really rehearse,” he explains. “We’re pretty close and we all know what we’re doing. We’ll run through a song once and then it gets added to our set list.”

Crowell says in December the band had an opportunity to play a series of shows on the East Coast where it performed each album in its entirety.

“This was extremely fun because it was a special engagement,” he says. “If we played one album at every show, I think people would get tired of it. Because this was a series, it allowed the fans to come back and see our music performed in different ways.”