Local music stays thriving lately as the band Old News released their latest EP, “Castro.” I sat down with lead vocalist Beau Harris about the intense focus needed to bring the record to life.

Your new EP, “Castro,” comes less than a year after your debut recording. What’s changed?

On the EP we did in April, which is called “Consolation Prize,” I played every instrument except for horns because I’m a terrible, terrible trumpet player. So, the biggest difference between the two records is that, once we got a full lineup set, we sat down for a couple months and just decided to a minute to detail how we wanted things to sound.

For example, with drums, we were like: We really like the drum sound from these three records. That lead into researching how those bands got those sounds. Then we went to the studio – the same studio we recorded the first record at – and took a more active production role. I’d tell our engineer, Thomas, let’s mic the drums this way, or let’s use compression in this fashion, to get a specific sound. It’s definitely the most control I’ve had from a production angle.

How much do you factor in the idea of playing a song live while you’re writing and recording it?

Well, that’s our building block. We’ve never recorded a song that we haven’t played a lot live for multiple reasons. You might think a song is the best thing ever, then you go perform it and people are like, “that song sucks, dude.” That’s a cool quality control thing for knowing if your fans are going to like it in the first place.

From a less technical side of things, is there a particular life experience that informs your music?

One thing I’ve always struggled with in my life is school. I’ve never been that great at it, but it’s always been an expectation. After years of not doing well, I restricted my life and reordered my priorities and was, I think, really excelling and then two weeks before finals week was involved in a really bad car accident. I had put so much effort and sacrifice in and when it finally came down to proving that, the injury to my hands really wrecked what I was I was trying to do. Most of the record was about learning that no matter how hard you try at something, something can come along and completely screw you over.

If you have an idea about the complete potential of the group, how far do you think you are to reach it?

I think we are maybe 5 percent of the way. One thing is that we’re very new — we’re still building an audience. But a lot of people view this as a two-step process — you start playing and then you make it. That is an understandable but very naïve viewpoint to take. It’s more like a thousand tiny steps and a thousand tiny victories along the way that you need to take before you have something self-sustainable.

Is there an aesthetic that you see your group aiming for that goes beyond the medium of music – visually, for example?

We make serious music, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re all goofs. We want to embody goofy light-heartedness but still have music that can be taken seriously. Trying to find that balance through aesthetics is difficult. Our aesthetic might be summed up as “fun sadboys,” like where people might see us and be like, those guys are goofy – but they sure can make good music.