The first time I saw Wham City Comedy, their performance consisted of ultra-specific jokes about train maintenance, a troubling read-through of a post-apocalyptic The Simpsons script, and a vicious back-and-forth with an audience member—which turned out to be completely staged.

It was one of the best shows I’d ever seen. It also created a possible fire hazard.

The guys were guests of a monthly comedy show I used to run, called The Hustle. It ran in the bar attached to the Creative Alliance. On a good night, the comic revue would see a crowd of maybe 30 people. That night, some 100 people crammed into the bar. They were there to see Ben O’Brien, Robby Rackleff, and Alan Resnick. Somehow, the trio even look like a comedy troupe: Resnick, 29, is short and lean with a trim beard, while O’Brien, 30, is a bit taller and in surprisingly good shape for a comedian. Rackleff, 34, looks like he might work on utility poles, or possibly be a utility pole—he towers over the other two performers. Wham City musician Mickey Freeland rounded out the bill, and I served as your humble emcee. It made for a memorable night and most likely a solid fire-code violation, according to bar staff. Luckily, the only thing on fire that night was the comedy.

“Wham City is alternative comedy without the pretension,” says veteran Baltimore comedian Mike Moran, who was there that night, explaining the group’s success. “That’s why they have such a rabid fanbase within Baltimore, and, increasingly, the country. Plus they’re just cool folks.”

Attendees who hadn’t seen Wham City Comedy live still knew their act, from cult YouTube videos or late-night television spots on Adult Swim. For certain segments of my generation, Adult Swim—a block of cable programming consisting of a modestly budgeted circus of outsider art and all-around silliness—is the height of art and comedy. And it’s a perfect fit for these rising stars.

Wham City Comedy evolved out of the ramshackle arts collective known as Wham City, which was cofounded by electronic music superstar Dan Deacon. The collective originated in the early 2000s at SUNY Purchase, the artsy public college just north of New York City. Upon graduation, this group of artists and musicians found a home in Baltimore. Cheap rent and a thriving DIY arts community seemed to agree with them. The larger arts collective would eventually break into several sub-groups, including Wham City Comedy.

“When Ben [O’Brien] and Dan Deacon put the tour together [in 2010], that was the first time all three of us started to work together as Wham City Comedy,” Rackleff says. “And something really clicked with all of us.”

“Wham City is alternative comedy without the pretension.”

They were energized by the live musical performances they saw on tour and wondered if a similar vibe could be created through comedy: “One of the things that brought the three of us together was a lot of our friends were musicians,” Rackleff explains. “I know I envied that, and I wanted to do more visually exciting comedy that could compete in a music show context.”

Then and now, their shows are a mix of standup, bizarre improv, and carefully scripted skits, punctuated with bits of digital video. Each member takes a turn in the spotlight. Sometimes, it’s O’Brien or Rackleff playing straight man to Resnick’s silent “MEmime” character. Sometimes, it’s one of the other two barely making it to safety as Rackleff storms around stage wearing a Sonic the Hedgehog costume. Every performance is different and every performance has a zeitgeisty energy.

Their live performances drew the attention of Dave Hughes, creator of Adult Swim’s Off The Air, who eventually worked with them as executive producer on a few video shorts.

Since then, it has been something of a whirlwind for the trio. When they’re not doing live comedy or making videos, they’re pitching shows in Los Angeles and working closely with Adult Swim executives. The group’s latest project? Filming a pilot presentation for Fox—well, sort of. Fox has teamed up with The Lonely Island—the cheerfully irreverent comedy-music troupe featuring SNL alum Andy Samberg—for a comedy development project called Party Over Here.

“Party Over Here approached us and said, ‘Give us some ideas for shows,’” says O’Brien. “It’s funded by Fox, but it’s a show incubator. With this deal, they can sell it to other places like Netflix, Hulu, etcetera.”

He can’t let on too much about the show itself, but shares its intriguing working title, The Internet. And yes, they got paid for the pilot presentation, but O’Brien wants to make it clear they are hardly raking in the cash. No one’s really committing to these projects; they’re just kind of taking fliers.

“I joke that we’re like the adjunct professors of TV,” O’Brien says.

This is literally true for Rackleff, who’s balancing his comedy duties with an adjunct professorship at the Maryland Institute College of Art in the fall. Appropriately, he’ll be teaching video.

As for O’Brien, he’s also teaching video at MICA and working on personal projects. His latest venture is producing a concert film for longtime collaborator Dan Deacon, about Deacon’s most recent tour. In keeping with the group’s multi-platform ethos, O’Brien did standup as Deacon’s opening act.

Resnick, a visual artist, has had his work shown in some local galleries. For him, jumping from medium to medium is part of the fun. “I like site-specific projects that only make sense in the context of the medium,” he says via e-mail. (“My phone is all broke,” he explains.) “Sometimes a new platform will inspire an idea.”

The group also has another video for Adult Swim in the works, their fourth. “It’s one of our strangest ideas yet,” Resnick promises. (Then it must be very strange, since one of their videos is a nature film that abruptly segues into an over-the-top miniature horror film about a suburban mom and her evil doppelgänger.) “We’re very lucky they keep letting us make this kind of thing.”

For a couple of years, O’Brien and Resnick lived in the Copycat warehouse on Guilford Avenue. The Copycat is a storied Baltimore institution, a former factory and industrial space that began renting out art studios in the ’80s. Artists started moving into their studios full time and it eventually turned into an apartment building. Rackleff lived in the City Arts building, a similar setup nearby.

O’Brien liked the creative energy of the Copycat, but says it could be stressful to be surrounded by so many working artists. “When you live there, you have to convince yourself you’re not at work. You end up obsessively working, and getting anxious.”

“We’re lucky they keep letting us make this kind of thing.”

Just this past year, O’Brien and Resnick moved into “real” houses in Hampden and Station North, respectively. Rackleff still lives in the City Arts building.

O’Brien says the move has been good for him, psychologically. “Because then you can take work off, instead of always being at the office,” he explains.

Still, the last year or so has been a constant grind. With The Internet, the guys have traveled a few times to California. O’Brien jokes that it’s actually cheap to stay in Los Angeles because they just couch surf and stay with friends. But being from Baltimore has proven to be something of a secret weapon.

“People in Los Angeles love that we’re from Baltimore,” O’Brien says. “They tell us not to move out here. It’s something people remember.”

Which suits the Wham City Comedy guys just fine.

“I can’t see myself moving to L.A. unless I decide to make a drastic lifestyle change,” O’Brien says. “Unless I decide to stop struggling, to move there and get a normal job, an industry job.”

He uses the word “struggling” with fondness. “This is our home,” he explains. “Baltimore speaks our language. We know people who do lighting, who do videography and editing. We understand the kind of resources that Baltimore has to offer. We still like [being] the underdog.”

And Rackleff likes the fact that Baltimore is a place where you can cut through red tape and just do stuff.

“Baltimore is a city a lot of people come to because they want to work on some kind of project or they have an idea and the city is still raw enough [to make it work], even now. You can get something done and feel like you’re accomplishing something.”

Toward the end of our interview, O’Brien gets contemplative. “Who knows where the world will be in 10 years?” he muses. “[These days], people have three jobs and hobbies and everyone has a brand. It’s a different world than I thought it would be. I’m just having fun and working with friends. There’s so many different ways to be funny and reach people.”

With the upcoming release of a new, ambitious album (out February 24 via Domino Records and now streaming via NPR), Dan Deacon talks touring with Arcade Fire, being inspired by Bob Dylan and Bill Murray, and the importance of learning to relax.

So tell me, what does Gliss Riffer mean?
[Laughs.] I get that question a lot. “Gliss” is a musical term, short for glissando, which is Italian for “to slide,” like when someone runs their hand up and down a piano. And “riffer” is like someone riffing or doing a solo on the guitar. So “gliss riffer,” I was imagining this character that only plays these sliding, riffing lines, but it was more that I just like the way those two words look and sound together.

You started writing the album in the spring of 2013 and recorded it in 2014, but what inspired you in the first place?
Writing music is kind of my main hobby, so I’m doing it all the time, but I wanted to make music alone again. It had been a long time since I’d made a record by myself. Everything since like 2006 with Spiderman of the Rings had been working with other people, or engineers, or performers.

Yeah, you had some 30 musicians on your last record, America.
There were a lot of people. But, yeah, I was on tour in Europe, in the back of the bus trying to not lose my mind and working on these songs, and I started thinking, wow, this doesn’t need strings or trumpets. I had become so obsessed with acoustic instruments on my previous albums that I forgot how much fun it was to make music with a computer. Plus, I had a studio space in Station North and wanted to utilize it, as both an instrument and a workspace. It was probably the most fun I ever had making a record. I hated finishing it but I knew it was done.

I had a similar feeling listening to it. I didn’t want it to stop. Especially the vocal-heavy tracks, which is kind of a new thing for you.
I did this show for the closing of 285 Kent in Brooklyn. I had a pretty nasty cold but I did it anyways and everyone was smoking and I was screaming and I lost my voice pretty bad. I’d lost it before but this was different. It wasn’t coming back and kept getting worse until I couldn’t even talk.

Luckily, I had just gotten health insurance—thanks Obama!
—so I went to the doctor. I didn’t have any permanent damage but I really screwed it up and it got me thinking about the voice as an instrument that expires. It’s going to go away. You listen to Elton John now compared to Elton John in the ’70s and it’s a different Elton John. I never really used my voice as a voice. I always used it as source material to process and make as foreign as possible. So with this record, I wanted to focus on it, because I’m not going to have it forever. I’m not going to be crooning out tunes in my 60s.

There are so many different voices on these tracks. It blows my mind that all of them are yours, even the female ones.
I used this technique where I record the music slower but sing it regularly and then speed it up, but not to an extreme level. The Beatles used to do it to make their voices sound slightly different or to hit harmonies they couldn’t normally hit.

I imagine it takes a while to get each voice, and even more so, each song just right. Was it hard to find that kind of time while touring with Arcade Fire this past fall?
I was planning to record all of August, because I wasn’t expecting to get that gig, but when I got the offer, there was no way I could turn it down. But I didn’t want to stop recording and lose all the momentum I’d gained, so when we were on tour, each night after I played, I’d go back to the hotel, slowly dismantle the bathroom, and turn it into a control room. I’d take the vents off and shove towels in them. I’d ask for as many extra pillows and blankets as I could get and cover all the hard surfaces so there wasn’t a lot of refraction. To diffuse the sound as best as possible. I made it a little isolation booth.

The hotel’s like, “What’s up with this guy…?”
Luckily they never knew till I left. [Laughs.] I mean, I would reassemble it.

There were a few tracks where I heard a hint of Arcade Fire. Do you feel like your time with the band influenced this album? It would be impossible to say it didn’t. Whenever you’re on tour with someone, you merge ever so slightly. You’re hearing the same set of music every night for a month, so you have a much different relationship with it by the end than you did at the beginning. I remember how different everyone sounded after the Baltimore round robin tour we did [with 29 local bands, including Beach House, Future Islands, Ed Schrader, etc.].

Whatever your influences, the lyrics feel rather personal.
It’s really track-by-track. They’re much more important in some than they are in others. I was listening to Ys by Joanna Newsom and Bringing It All Back Home by [Bob] Dylan and realized they were both telling these stories—these sort of surreal stories that don’t make any sense but make perfect sense, you know what I mean? And I thought I’d really like to do that. The song that is most representative of me, lyrically, is “When I Was Done Dying.” In my mind, that song stands out. It’s different from the rest, but it’s my favorite track on the record.

They seem to address such grand, perplexing topics: life, growing old, the uncertainty and fear that circles those things.
America was a larger reflection upon where I exist within the context of the United States and our culture. Gliss Riffer as a whole is much more personal. It’s me exposing myself, figuring out the root of my anxieties, and who or what the hell is going on inside of my own brain.

What made you want to delve inward that way?
I used to really struggle with stress addiction, where I liked to do the most logistically impractical things, like adding 20 people to my band and touring on a bus that runs on garbage, just to create situations that were impossible. I thought if I can do the impossible, then I can do anything, and that became the goal. I was addicted to the stress and the adrenaline and not even appreciating what I get to do, and that resulted in a lot of anxiety and confusion about my work.

And so you decided to tackle that head on?
I made a conscious decision. I scaled back, but I also took everything on myself. Now I was the only ears listening. I was so used to having other people in the room, telling me if it was a good take or we should keep it, but now I had to make all the decisions. And what if it sucks?

Luckily, my friend Eric Hatch who runs the Maryland Film Festival shared this
Bill Murray clip about how you’re the best at what you do when you’re as relaxed as you can possibly be. I saw it during the process of mixing the record and it blew my mind. It changed my whole perspective on the way I work and perform and it brought the album to another place.

Now I see where the track “Learning to Relax” came from. Doing so allows you to just breathe, which in turn allows things to both rush in and out.
Exactly. I used to approach every project like it was a building on fire and I was trying to like get out of it, and now I’m like well, why don’t we just put out the fire?

The album is still ambitious, but there’s this new simplicity that makes it just so…pretty.
I’m glad it comes through.

Well you should probably just revel in this moment for a while, but any big plans for what’s next?
It’s hard to say. I’m going to be on tour for the next nine months and all you can do when you’re on tour, since like six hours of your day is sitting in some sort of vehicle, is sit there and think. I’ll probably come back with a slew of ideas and if I can achieve one of them, I’ll be very happy.

And hopefully we’ll see you in Baltimore?
Oh, definitely.