LOS ANGELES


LAST fall Bethany Cosentino was working on “The Only Place,” the second full-length album by her indie rock band, Best Coast. Day after day, she’d drive to Capitol Studios, in the Capitol Records building in Hollywood, the hallowed halls where the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra and others recorded some of their most important work. On the way, she’d listen to “Take Care,” the Drake album that had just come out.


“Honestly, when I was writing a lot of lyrics for this record, I was very hesitant to be as honest as I was, because I was like, I don’t want people to ask me ‘What was your problem?,’ ” she said on a sunny, breezy day in early March.


But Drake, hip-hop’s foremost confessor, left a mark. “I was just like, You know what?” — she cursed, for emphasis — “I’m going to make this record like a rapper would make it, or at least how Drake would make it.”


The result is an album that invites all sorts of attention. “The Only Place” (Mexican Summer) is a huge step forward for this formerly committedly small duo. Ms. Cosentino is more forceful and direct in her lyrics here than ever before and, thanks partly to the producer Jon Brion, the careful craftsman who’s been responsible for some of Fiona Apple and Kanye West’s most vivid work, she sounds more alive, bursting out of the mix.


On this day, Ms. Cosentino, 25, was at her modest home here, in the Eagle Rock section, a “totally residential neighborhood,” she said, where she’s lived in for most of the last seven years, apart from a stint in New York. “I get so comfortable,” she said, feet tucked up under her on her living room couch. Snacks, her Internet-famous cat, was resting in a back room.


This outrageously still neighborhood jibes well with Ms. Cosentino’s domestic side. When home from tour, she prefers to stay in, watching shows like “Ice Loves Coco” and “Khloé & Lamar.” On a table next to the couch was a copy of “Hiding From Reality,” the memoir by Taylor Armstrong of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” On the shelves along the wall sat oodles of comedy-TV DVDs.


“I am a very weird, anxious person, especially socially,” she said. “I don’t go out a lot. I spend most of my time at home.” When Ms. Cosentino was young, she said, she learned she had an anxiety disorder — she takes Xanax — but she’s rarely discussed it, though it’s crept into her songwriting and performing. In Best Coast’s earliest incarnations she was outright hiding, her vocals suffocated by layers of reverb and distortion. “When we first started I was very afraid to get on stage and sing,” she said, instead “disguising the talent I wasn’t really ready for people to hear.”


She could, in fact, sing well. She took opera lessons as a child, and was signed to a major label as a teenage pop-star never-was. For a time, she played in a pop-punk band affiliated with her church.


When in New York, she interned at the Fader, the music and style magazine, but interviewing bands just made her realize that she wanted to start one, so she moved back home. Before long, she met Bobb Bruno, 38, now her partner in Best Coast. The two got to know each other while Ms. Cosentino was in Pocahaunted, a drone-and-chant rock band that could rightly be called the anti-Best Coast. Mr. Bruno, whose tastes are catholic, often worked with Pocahaunted, but bonded with Ms. Cosentino over lighter fare.


Ms. Cosentino said: “I’d be like, ‘You like the Beach Boys? You’re wearing a Burzum shirt. What’s your deal?’ ”


In 2010, following a slew of 7-inch singles, Best Coast released its debut album “Crazy for You,” a set of simple and pungent songs in which the duo toyed with 1950s and ’60s melodic structures. That sound became something of a touchstone, though, setting a tone several other bands adopted, leading Ms. Cosentino to want to run in a different direction.


Deciding to work with Mr. Brion was a statement of ambition and purpose: no more hiding. “Jon really, really liked our first record,” Mr. Bruno said in a phone interview. “He told me all the little things about it that he liked.”


In the studio, Mr. Brion hoped to largely stay out of the way.