U.S. indie rockers Spoon, right, have just released their seventh album, Transference. (Autumn De Wilde/Merge Records)

"Transference" is the term psychoanalysts use to describe a process in which people project feelings they've buried deep down inside onto a new object or person. According to one theorist, transference turns a person into an "emotional time machine" — though not a Hot Tub Time Machine, sadly — when a trigger catapults his or her "emotional past and psychological needs into the present."

A Spoon song never gets up in your face — it sneaks up on you when you're not expecting it and gently teases out a primal reaction.

This phenomenon explains why music fans often experience intense emotional relationships with pop stars they've never met. The songs are catalysts for emotional echoes that are called up from your past — the artist then provides the blank slate onto which those dynamics are projected. You may not realize it, but that's transference, baby.

Transference is also what the fellows in the indie rock group Spoon decided to call their latest album. For a band whose record titles can seem deliberately, sometimes infuriatingly obscure — see Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007) and Gimme Fiction (2005) — they've really hit the nail on the head this time. "Transference" is a striking assessment of why Spoon's understated music has such a potent effect.

A Spoon song never gets up in your face — it sneaks up on you when you're not expecting it, wriggles into a corner of your psyche and gently teases out a primal reaction. That might be why Spoon's catalogue holds such appeal for soundtrack supervisors. You can probably hum the sing-songy intro to their 2004 tune The Way We Get By — it's turned up in prime-time dramas (The O.C.) and film trailers (The Savages). The swaggering I Turn My Camera On has helped set the mood in TV series like Bones, Veronica Mars and even The Simpsons. The Will Ferrell film Stranger Than Fiction (2006) served as an extended Spoon music video — singer and songwriter Britt Daniel was a chief collaborator on the soundtrack.

Because Daniel has a somewhat elusive, enigmatic persona, he's an ideal canvas for a listener's projections. Another musician who runs in the same circles as the Spoon frontman recently summed up his approach as "coy or sly." Daniel doesn't argue with that.

"That's kind of my personality," he offers in a recent phone interview. "If I'm ever funny, it's in a very subtle way. I like that better. I feel more comfortable presenting something that's a little sly, rather than something that shouts at you."

That's an apt appraisal of the Spoon m.o. Daniel founded the band with drummer Jim Eno in Austin, Tex. back in 1993. The pair named their new project after a tune by the German group Can, the 1960s-era krautrock crew known for its minimalist grooves. Almost two decades later, Daniel and Eno have perfected their own sleek, silvery sound. The quintessential Spoon song is a triumph of doing more with less, a percussive pop gem with taut, angular guitars and stuttering, spare vocals. At this point, those understated tunes are reaching a wide range of listeners: Transference debuted at #4 on the Billboard Top 200.

(Merge Records)

The song Who Makes Your Money (off Transference) illustrates this well. The track seems to begin in mid-sentence, as a woozy, muted drum break and an undulating keyboard riff lead you toward Daniel's murmured, cryptic tale about the moral quandaries of modern capitalism. It's a strange mantra of a tune that breaks stride midway through, when sunny guitar chords shine through the haze, then quickly regains its wobbly, disorienting rhythm. Transference's penultimate track, Got Nuffin, has a more straightforward garage rock attitude, but it's still an exercise in elegant simplicity: the razor-edged guitar riffs and plunking piano play call-and-response with twin melodies.

Daniel explains that with Transference, "I wanted to have songs that repeated themselves a lot. It was a semi-conscious decision just because there's an intensity you get from that kind of song that's different from the experience of a conventional pop song. You get on a thing and stay on it and maintain that intensity."

Daniel says he was inspired by several recordings, including the last LCD Soundsystem record and American composer Cliff Martinez's score for the Steven Soderbergh film Solaris. "That soundtrack's been pretty big for me. It gets so repetitive, and you feel like you're being sucked into a wormhole."

For all that emphasis on repetition, Transference is still a deliciously varied collection of songs. It ricochets from the fever dream of Who Makes Your Money's to the saloon swagger of Written in Reverse, from the gleaming electric guitars on Trouble to Goodnight Laura, an austere lullaby. While pretty, Goodnight Laura is a bit of a sore thumb in the Spoon canon. An airy, quiet ballad with a simple piano arrangement, it finds Daniel eschewing his trademark vocal delivery — which falls somewhere between a bark and a yelp — in favour of a tender croon.

"A friend of mine was having trouble sleeping," Daniel explains, "and for some reason I gave myself an hour to write her a lullaby. I think that limitation worked — I got it done fast, and I think it's pretty good. It's a song that could get syrupy if it was done in a different way. If it hadn't been recorded so primitively — with a mic set up at the piano and a mic across the room — it might not have worked. We got that spooky piano sound, and that was it.

"When you're constrained," he muses, "maybe you're more willing to let down your guard."

The songs on Transference slip seamlessly into one another. At the end of the song Mystery Zone, for instance, there's a trippy echo effect and a fuzzy overlay of watery chords that neatly set up Who Makes Your Money. In that way, it's a very typical Spoon record, one that rewards folks who still appreciate listening to full albums.

"I love albums where they get into a particular mood or stay in one style," Daniel begins, "like those depressing Cure records, or the Amy Winehouse record that's all amazing R&B, or that one Cowboy Junkies record [The Trinity Session]. I admire those records, but whenever we start working on a record, we're just struggling to make each song work on its own. We throw out the window all our preconceived notions of what the album's supposed to be, because we're desperately fighting to make the song work. And I guess we end up with something that's more like the [Beatles'] White Album — stylistically speaking."

It's strange to hear this seasoned songwriter talk about struggling to make a song work. Then again, Daniel's not given to trumpeting his own accomplishments. Ask whether he's tickled when he pulls off a particularly coy or sly manoeuvre in a song, and he waffles. The day we spoke, Daniel shifted the focus away from himself to talk about It's Frightening, a 2009 record he produced for the Brooklyn rock sextet White Rabbits.

"When I was recording that last White Rabbits record and we finished this song The Company I Keep, I remember listening back to that and thinking, 'Wow, I don't know how that ended up sounding so good!' I always knew [the song] was gonna be something kinda special, but nobody could've shot for how the sum of those parts added up.

"I had this realization," he sighs, "that the most magical stuff happens and it's your doing, but you don't even know how you achieved it."

Transference is in stores now. Spoon play in Toronto on March 29 and Vancouver on April 11.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBC News.