X factor

Even longtime fans of local rock band LCG & the X might not recognize some of the songs on its self-titled debut.

LCG & the X celebrates the album’s release 8:30 p.m. Friday at 51st Street Speakeasy, 1114 NW 51st St. Vocalist and Moog player Morgan Hartman said the band, which formed in 2016, spent about a year and a half on the album, and many of the songs changed in the process.

“We ended up manipulating and kind of changing a lot of the songs and sound,” Hartman said.

Producer Jarod Evans at Blackwatch Studios gave the band helpful advice about songwriting structure, Hartman said.

“He helped a lot with, like, ‘Why is this song so long?’ ‘We’re going to cut this part.’ ‘This part that you have as a verse is actually a way better hook, so what if we tried to make that the chorus?’” Hartman said.

Singles “Part Time Lovin’” and “Runaway,” both released last year, are good indicators of album’s sound, Hartman said, but the band took the original demos of its songs offline because many of them were no longer representative of the finished products.

“They changed so significantly that it wasn’t even almost the same song — in a great way,” Harman said. “I’ve recorded stuff before and so has [guitarist Pilar V. Guarddon Pueyo] but this was pretty much its own new experience for us in a lot of ways, getting in the studio and having a producer that does this all the time on a larger scale and is really good at it and kind of like a studio doctor. … Except for the singles that we have out now, I think they’re going to sound like brand-new songs to everyone, which is great.”

Part of the recording process was learning “what’s important and what’s not,” Hartman said.

“If you have a connection to a part and it’s not really relevant to anyone to listen to a billion times in a row, which is kind of what you want, you’ve got to kick it to the curb,” Hartman said. “If you have an intro that’s two measures too long, people are just going to skip, especially an out-of-state audience, people that literally don’t know who you are. We have friends, I’m sure, that would bear through it because they have a personal connection … but random people will just go to the next song.”

Thoughtful editing and structuring was important, but so was making sure the songs still have the LCG & the X sound and personality.

“These songs are very personal and very creative,” Hartman said. “They weren’t written for publishing or anything. They were written from a personal place, so there’s always the option to be more repetitive or whatever, but we’ve decided to make sure we kept our personal essence on it without making it too sterilized, which is easy to do. You can suck the character right out of it if you do too much to it or overthink it too much or start thinking that what you’re doing isn’t good enough, which is easy to do. You’ve got to be like, ‘Nope. This is OK. It’s OK that I said this. … We’re going to keep it. It might not be as pragmatic or make as much sense right now, but we’re going to do it.’”

Labrys and Twiggs share the bill. Admission is $5. Call 405-463-0470 or visit 51stspeakeasy.com.