Fiery Furnaces on how to subvert the expectation of unexpectedness.

The Fiery Furnaces have a reputation for quirkiness. Through a career that has thus far seen the release of records like the conceptually globetrotting Blueberry Boat, the backmask-laden Bitter Tea, the geriatrically narrated Rehearsing My Choir and Remember, the “live” album cobbled together from countless shows over the course of three years, maybe that reputation is deserved.

But when everyone begins to expect the unexpected — and looking at the “deaf descriptions,” fan-written reviews of the Furnaces’ newest record written before any fans had heard the album, that’s what no small number of people expected from I’m Going Away — what’s a band to do?

If you’re the Fiery Furnaces, you release a record this summer that, since actually hearing it, listeners have called straightforward, generic or boring, depending on their level of acrimony.

At least one half of the Furnaces calls it “casual,” a decidedly new style for a band who has dabbled in a lot of them.

“We can’t make the same record every time,” Matthew Friedberger says. “That would be cheating.”

So each time the Furnaces make a record — and I’m Going Away is the band’s eighth — they have to do something new, which is of course dependent almost solely on what they’ve already done. Nearly a decade of quirkiness cleared the path, important to both the band and to its listeners.

“We wouldn’t have felt free to make this record if we hadn’t set up people’s expectations with the records we’ve made in the past,” the male Friedberger says. “To people who have never heard the band, this will sound very conventional, and that’s good and bad. But for people who know the band, hopefully, it’ll be funny, both amusing and a little bit queer.”

It’s easy to label a band like the Fiery Furnaces as simply “different for the sake of being different.” It’s also a bit unfair.

While Friedberger is intent on keeping things interesting superficially, he’s also driven by making sure there’s some depth, too. It’s just that this time, the band wanted to let the listeners do some of the work.

“We wanted this record to be unelaborated, to make people have to do the work themselves,” he says. “They have to elaborate it themselves in their own imaginations. A lot of people prefer that.”

This, it seems, is the key to the Fiery Furnaces modus operandi: challenging listeners in a way that ultimately rewards them.

In the past, it has been records that were sonically dense and lyrically prolix. On I’m Going Away, it has been by offering much sparser arrangements and letting — or forcing — listeners to fill in the blanks themselves.

And the band is elaborating on it as well, releasing a pair of albums rearranging the songs from its latest record. Friedberger says the reasons for this are many.

For one, the band rearranges its songs for live performances anyway. So this time, they figured they would record them too, into two records, each with half the songs arranged by Matthew and the other half by his sister Eleanor, so that in total each will have redone the entire album.

Further, prior to the album’s release, the Fiery Furnaces asked its fans to write reviews of the record without having heard it. So while the new versions of the songs on I’m Going Away will not be copies of what pre-reviewers expected to hear, Friedberger says he felt compelled to match the effort his fans put into their reviews by releasing alternate versions of the same record. He owes them, after all.

“You play a show and if it’s pop music in any way,” he says, “you have some obligation in some way to be more egalitarian, more democratic.”

This sense of indebtedness to its listeners seems to drive a lot of what the Fiery Furnaces do. After asking fans to review its last record (albeit before even hearing it), the band is asking fans to actually perform the next one, a so-called “silent record” that will be released in the spring. The band will offer sheet music as well as all kinds of other peripheral instructions and guides for performance. Again, Friedberger has an explanation.

“Since before the Beatles, part of the rock model is that the composer and the performer is the same person,” he says. “So it’s fun to play with the opposite, where there’s a gap between the perspective and aim and expectations of the person writing it and the people who are going to perform it, whether they’re trying to enact the songwriter’s vision or just use it as a way to express whatever they want to express or the talents that they have.”

Again, he has more.

“The second thing is the idea that since a band can’t sell audio anymore, we’re not going to provide it,” he says. “We don’t mean to be complaining about that, but records have become much less an important part of the way musicians make a living.

“The third thing is because shows are so important to rock bands now, more important than the records, you have an obligation to do something different with these shows. You have to find different ways to have gatherings of fans and of your band being more interesting. Fans can make recordings of Silent Record and that would be fine, too, but the idea is to focus on the opportunity to have shows, to bring people together because they’re fans of the band, to have the band drop out and have the shows just be about the audience.”

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s a fan-reviewed album I’m Going Away and a fan-performed album Silent Record. What comes next is, naturally, a fan-written album.

At shows during the past year or two, the Fiery Furnaces asked members of the audience to pass to the stage whatever bits of trash they might have in their pockets: movie tickets, dry cleaning stubs, fast food receipts, whatever. The band’s goal is to turn these bits of prosaic ephemera into an album, not just from gleaning lyrics from the text but also from turning serial numbers and account balances into chord progressions and rhythm patterns.

The aptly titled Democ-Rock — an album by the people, for the people — should be out in the summer. The band has 15 or 16 songs ready and hasn’t ruled out adding more, but Friedberger insists he isn’t just outsourcing.

“It’s not fair to make the fans of the band actually write the songs and send them to you, making them work,” he says “It has to be automatic or inattentive writing on their part.”

Not that he’s afraid to challenge people, not even at the risk of alienating them.

“As a rock band, you have to change,” Friedberger says. “You have to be more willing to displease the people who like you than to please them. You have to make things that people want to come to, as opposed to things that go to people and give them the equivalent of a backrub and say ‘please love me.’ There’s a difference between setting up an expectation and trying to fulfill it and setting up an expectation and then having it be a little surprise. The pleasure comes from the surprise, as opposed to the fulfillment of the expectation.”

This, Friedberger says, is the drama of being a fan, hoping the band sticks to what drew you to them but changes enough to avoid getting stale. He was mum on what other plans the band has — though it definitely has other plans — but he was clear that despite all the territory the Fiery Furnaces have covered in their career so far, they’re constantly looking for new ground to cover.

“Unless you’re a band like the Ramones and you just have this one thing that you do and you have to get the message out, it’s traditional to change,” Friedberger says. “That’s what would be sincere, that you would try something a little different each time. If you didn’t, that would be strange.”