When this feisty pack of Montrealers rose from indie obscurity to become Pitchfork darlings in 2005, no one was more surprised than Wolf Parade.

“We went on tour in our van, totally unaware of what was going on, and as soon as we returned home, everyone was like, ‘Oh, you’re huge!’” keyboardist Hadji Bakara admits, in an interview conducted over the phone back in April. “It was weird.”

Attribute what you will to Wolf Parade’s success: the media’s determination to make Montreal into the next next Seattle; a Canadian band signed to American mega-indie Sub Pop with a debut album produced by Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock; or a WTF trend of lupine-titled bands (Wolfmother, Wolf Eyes, We Are Wolves). Whatever the reason, Apologies to The Queen Mary became the de rigueur sound of Canadian indie. With gale-force guitars and the fevered howls of songwriters Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner set to whirlwinds of synthesizers, Wolf Parade soon found themselves Plateau celebrities, Polaris Prize nominees and the soundtrack of our lives.

“We didn’t like our last record, we liked the songs,” says Bakara. “We’d written those songs years before, and some of them were two-and-a-half, three years old. It’s too bad that by the time we [became popular], we were no longer attached to them and had to play them for the next two years.

“Wolf Parade is not the end all and be all of what everyone wants to do in their lives.”
Perhaps the blame rests on the band’s various side projects. There’s the new-wave gloss of Boeckner’s Handsome Furs vs. the prog rock din of Krug’s Sunset Rubdown; guitarist Dante DeCaro (formerly of Hot Hot Heat) currently fronts Jonny and the Moon; while Bakara is one half of Montreal dance-zombies Megasoid. With such a fragmented roster engaged in more personal forms of music, Wolf Parade took their time to consider their follow-up, recorded in a few months after a lengthy hiatus.

The much-anticipated At Mount Zoomer is a grower, not a shower. It shifts frenetically, seemingly without reason, mutating from one genre to another from chorus to chorus, sticking firmly to the band’s “no singles” mandate. (They’re right; the spacey Spoon-esque ragga riff of “Fine Young Cannibals” makes for an excellent B-side, but you wouldn’t order it up on a jukebox.) Recorded in extended jam sessions at the Arcade Fire’s infamous church studio and produced by drummer Arlen Thompson, Wolf Parade had to backtrack to their love of Peter Gabriel and Fleetwood Mac (Bakara is currently pitching Continuum Books on a book for their 33 1/3 series about the latter’s 1982 album Mirage), considering what they wanted Wolf Parade to sound like without the guidance of Isaac Brock. As it turns out, Wolf Parade really want to sound like death metal.

“We got really drunk at the studio one night, and started jamming intensely for hours. The next morning we woke up and everyone was like, ‘What the hell did you do? This sounds like Slayer!’” says Bakara. “The recording process was mostly concerned with removing a lot from the album and paring it down.”

They can’t have trimmed much from the near-11-minute “Kissing The Beehive,” the sole piece co-written by Boeckner and Krug  (who otherwise trade off on vocals and writing credits track by track), adding to the song’s jarring deception. Beginning as a taut guitar jam, Krug matches a voice-shredding bellow to Boeckner’s scream as the lyrics shift from death wishes to proclamations of cynical detachment (“I wish I could believe in who you are / you held your cock in the air and called it a guitar”). As in all good prog, there are about 17 songs’ worth of material, all with guitars lifted from Television’s “Marquee Moon.” As the instruments coagulate in patches and spurts, a near-fatal collision of bleating synthesizers, thunderous drums and haunting moans stops the listener dead.

While Bakara prefers Wolf Parade’s new material to the old, he acknowledges the positive aspects of being celebrated for it.

“On a pragmatic level, we were able to tour before the record came out and the internet did all the work for us. It’s not always the best-case scenario — you never want the hype to replace the quality or connectivity you receive in music, but we haven’t had any real backlash yet,” he says. “We’re still waiting for it.”