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She’s a coal miner’s daughter for real, Loretta Lynn with a punk streak, a thunderbolt of a laugh and a top secret defense clearance — but more on that later.

For almost two decades now, Kelley Deal has been bashing out kaleidoscopic pop with her twin sister, Kim, in The Breeders, a band whose Midwestern heritage flies over its catalog like a battle flag, evidenced by the blue-collar recordings and touches of Appalachia in its diffuse, homespun tunes.

“We live in Dayton, Ohio, and that’s like 40 minutes from Kentucky,” the singer/guitarist says recently while on tour in the U.K. “And my mom and dad are from West Virginia. My dad used to be a coal miner, and my mom’s father was a coal miner who actually died of black lung. I remember watching ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ with my mom, and she’d talk about how you painted the inside and outside of your house once every year because of the coal dust. It was really interesting.”

Deals’ roots are more discernible than ever on her band’s latest disc — and first in six years — the pop pinball that is the recently released “Mountain Battles.”

On it, The Breeders ricochet from chirpy ear candy (“It’s the Love”) to hazy psych rock jams (“No Way”) to pretty, delicately spun elegies (“Night of Joy”) to blithe country worthy of the Carter Family (“Here No More”).

The album pulses with a warm, organic feel largely attributable to the band’s insistence on restricting every aspect of the recording process to analog equipment, eschewing all things digital, for a natural, unadorned presentation that is the audio equivalent of the Dogme 95 filmmaking movement.

“I like computers,” Deal says matter-of-factly. “I’ve worked with computers for a long time. I worked for the defense industry, I used to have a top secret clearance. So I’ve worked with computers, and they’re great tools, but I do not make music on computers.

“(Pixies guitarist) Joey Santiago has a fantastic quote about this, he goes, ‘Kim, you get me on Protools, and I will suck the soul out of any piece of music,’ ” she continues with a hearty chuckle. “Going to Willie’s in Minneapolis and finding that amp and figuring out what the setting is and which pedals you want, that’s part of this development thing that you’re missing out on.”

Breeders’ records — long-gestating and intermittent, with only four having been issued in the band’s off-and-on 20-year career — always have been reflective of this kind of slow-simmering, figure-it-out-as-you-go approach to songwriting.

Because of this, all the band’s discs are full of tangents and hairpin turns, to the extent that what’s around the next corner is always a mystery.

Kim and Kelley’s honeyed voices form a bedrock of come-hither melodies, upon which just about any structure can be built — and often is.

“It’s kind of a natural thing,” Deal says of the band’s wide-ranging albums. “I don’t know if there’s some bands that have, like, a band meeting or something before they make a record. They get together and say, ‘OK, listen, on that record we did this. On this new record, we’re going to explore our jazz fusion roots.’ I don’t know if bands do that or not, but we obviously don’t. We kind of accumulate 40 minutes of music that we really like and then put that out.”

Plenty of The Breeders’ new tunes will be aired on the band’s current tour, its first in more than five years.

“It’s really fun to do the new songs,” Deal says. “And I kind of feel bad, because when I go to shows, I like to hear the ones I know. I want to hear the good ones — all the old ones that I have a history with. And we’ve always been really good about that, but for this record for some reason, we want to open up with (their signature hit) ‘Cannonball’ and then just play the new record. And we’ve never felt like that before. We’re not doing that, but we are doing a lot of songs from it.”

Chatty and affable, Deal’s quite the character, a tractor beam of mirth and mischief.

She seems to take things as they come — a lesson that applies doubly when parsing The Breeders’ catalog.

“In this band, I know what my job is,” says Deal, who’s also helmed her own pop outfit, the Kelley Deal 6000. “I don’t want to front this band. If I want to front a band, I can do that.

“But I like my job in this band, which is to tell her what to do,” she says of her sister, with a howl of laughter. “And make sure you print that.”

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.