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For some bands, the creative process is akin to modern farming.

Genres are dissected and broken down and spliced together. Songs are germinated and nurtured and plucked from the pack to be destroyed if they don't measure up. Riffs are fertilized and amplified to get something bigger and better and more awesome than ever before.

If such an analogy applies to popular music, then the three members of Yo La Tengo might well be the equivalent of a small organic farm. Because when Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew get together, there is no science at work.

Everything, McNew told The Daily Times this week, evolves naturally, and it's been that way since he first joined the band back in 1992.

"When I first started playing with the group -- I joined as kind of a temporary member at first -- I would go to New York and practice on the weekends," he said. "I had learned everything they had done up to 1991 and all of the cover songs they were doing, but our practices turned out to be long and mostly just filled with conversations about TV shows and records. All of the sudden, we found we had a lot in common and a lot of similar tastes.

"It's kind of a difficult thing to describe -- you can't really compare it to what it was like for other bands and what they were thinking when they started out. I think that for us, the success was in writing music and songs and figuring out how to make better music and better records and better songs, and how to be a better live band.

"And even then," he added, "those goals were unspoken."

Kaplan and his wife, drummer Georgia Hubley, formed the band in 1984, touring and recording as a four-piece for 1986's "Ride the Tiger" debut album. On the cutting edge of the college and indie rock scenes, the band went through myriad members during its early years while simultaneously releasing such now-classics as 1989's "President Yo La Tengo" and 1990's acoustic "Fakebook," an album of cover songs.

McNew joined the band as its permanent bass player in 1992, solidifying the Yo La Tengo lineup and kicking off a creative streak that continued to wow critics. "Painful," in 1993, also began a diversification of the band's sound, incorporating elements of folk, punk, shoegazing (a predecessor to emo) and the noise rock of Sonic Youth. The sound culminated on 1997's "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One," considered by many critics to be their finest work to date.

After 2003's mellow-sounding "Summer Sun," 2006's "I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass" showcased a harder edge that earned the record five stars from Entertainment Weekly, an 8.3 on a scale of 10 from Pitchfork and 9 out of 10 from PopMatters.

Leave it to Yo La Tengo, however, to shift gears unexpectedly. The band's new album -- "Popular Songs," released Sept. 8 -- is more subtle than its predecessor, an introspective, occasionally groovy, often-dreamy album that flows like a stream over time-worn rocks, sliding around one side or another with grace and ease.

But really, McNew said, Yo La Tengo's music as a whole can be viewed as that stream. It may subtly shift direction, he said, but -- barring an earthquake of New Madrid magnitude -- it doesn't alter its course drastically. It may slowly nibble away at its banks, growing wider and more expansive, but it doesn't tear away chunks of the landscape and muddy the waters with what's ripped up.

"So little is different, I think, from record to record," he said. "Certainly in the actual recording sessions and the time period leading up to recording, when we're just coming up with ideas for songs and moods, we keep a lot of our methods pretty much the same. I think, we write in a real slow process, as a group -- it would be so much more practical, I suppose, if one of us just went home and wrote songs and showed up to practice and told everyone how the new Yo La Tengo songs will go, but it doesn't work that way.

"We write out of improvisation, and we've kept to that method for 15 years or so. Following that way of working together, and continuing to work with our producer and our engineer, keeps things solid and really kind of gives us a foundation to sort of drift out further and try stuff we've never tried before."

That solid foundation, he added, gives each Yo La Tengo album an entry into the overall story arc of the band. Each one is a unique entry, filled with its own character and mood, but viewed as a whole, they're a testament to the fluidity with which the three members approach rock 'n' roll.

"There's nothing that doesn't seem true to us, to me," McNew said. "When we play shows, our sets are pretty long and pretty encompassing as far as our catalog and old songs and things like that go. I think that our new songs always kind of fit in with our old songs, in my mind, and even when we're writing them and they're in an embryonic stage, they still feel that way.

"There are times when I can sort of draw that line from a new song to a part of an old song or to a sound that we had created at some point; I think the occasional self-reference is kind of inevitable. But there have definitely been times during the period where we're writing songs and getting them ready to record, where we've tried to recreate sounds we've done before, only to have it go horribly wrong and turn into something new as well.

"I kind of look at it as a nice accident by way of incompetence," he added with a chuckle.