Gang of Losers marks Montreal, Canada sextet the Dears breakout point. With preceding album No Cities Left showcasing their range of emotional depth and feeling, as well as astonishing musicality, the group’s fourth album is a positive rock ‘n roll record, despite the negative connotation in the title.

As a much more immediate record, it seems made for playing in the live context. By contrast, the Dears previous releases were augmented by an array of extra instrumentation. “After we made No Cities Left we did a fair bit of touring; roughly around three years of touring around the world,” explains frontman Murray Lightburn. It became a huge part of the Dears’ lives, playing in excess of 200 shows a year, and it made sense to make their new release a reflection of the band – they wanted to showcase that immediacy and that sort of raw feeling captured in a live performance. “It was one of the curses that we’ve had on record: trying to evoke more of a feeling that you get when you see a band rather than making a live record,” he explains.

Murray explains that the inspiration for the production approach was that the band have performed a series of live radio shows, as well as releasing a live album in Canada, and the old school approach with little or no edits or little punch-ins, was something that they set out to do. Songs like “Ticket to Immortality” and “Hate Then Love” are exactly that; punchy and immediate. Elsewhere, “Fear Made the World” begins with a Curtis Mayfield-like vibe, with soul tinges and a brilliant keyboard break down midway through.

“That orchestral soul stuff was very appealing, but that’s only the first part of the song – there’s the potential of four songs in there,” Murray says. “The arrangement is more inspired by something like “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, with four songs in a row in four minutes. It’s got all these different arrangements in one, but for some reason it’s seamless.”

Murray describes the songwriting process for Gang of Losers as being dramatically, drastically different, and almost the opposite of what the Dears had done in the past. “The process behind No Cities Left was much more of a cut ‘n paste process,” he explains, “whereas this was much more moments of clarity, and moments of it coming crashing down on you – words and melodies and chords all coming down together and just rushing to the nearest instrument and hashing it out quickly and record it on whatever is near by, and hold onto it.”

As such, Gang of Losers is instinctual, and feels like a straightforward record for the Dears. But it would be a major ‘statement’ record for anyone else. After No Cities Left, where the Dears were pulled in every different direction that you can think of at once, it made them stronger emotionally, but also stronger as a musical unit, and helped them find their voice. “I think most importantly I feel like the Dears have found their voice on this album, and less comparisons can be made, or they will be because it’s the notion of the media to need to contextualise for their audience because they think their audience isn’t very bright and they think they need to spoon feed them rather than letting it be what it is, for what it is.”

Certainly, influences can still flitter through Gang of Losers – with his deep and textured vocal chords, Murray is always going to get the Morrissey comparison. But a song like the glorious “Whites Only Party” has the same joyous sort of feel of the Cure’s “Lovecats” – it’s a happy, bouncy sound, but with a dark undertone to it. “Some people have said Tusk on that one,” he says in reference to the Fleetwood Mac album. “On this record there weren’t any pointed references; it was really abstract and I think because of the way we went about the pre-production phase and rehearsing the music before we went into the studio it was just myself, George [Domoso III, drums] and Martin [Pelland, bassist] laying down the foundation.”

So whilst the three other bandmates were asking when they should come in, the core trio were in such a groove that they simply had to wait their turn. “We’d created such a world as a trio and I think that attributes to the raw approach to the production,” he says. “Things were added on a ‘need to add’ basis, and even then when we took it in to mixing we stripped it back even more, which was really cool – he took stuff out then added it back in as needed, so it wasn’t always the same arrangement.”

Whilst it can be difficult for any artist to distance himself from the mixing process, Murray explains that it wasn’t the case for Gang of Losers. “I can trust him completely,” he says of Scott, who mixed the album. “The band trusts me to be with Scott to be the voice of the band. There was a fair element of trust in the process of making this whole album, from us trusting each other in the jam space to trusting the engineers to trusting our instincts.”

It turns out that it was very much a deliberate approach to make this a much tighter album, “Any fat that was on there we’d cut off if we could,” Murray agrees. “But we are the Dears, and we’re still going to have our forty second intros and lulls and breaks.”

And that’s part of the charm of the band – it’s all about the movements. “I guess if we have any trademark it’s in our arrangements,” he guesses. “That’s the stuff that we like to hear in music. We like some proggy stuff, but we like straight-up rock, and some metal, and it’s all across the board.”

The Dears’ Gang of Losers is out now.