Evan Crawley has spent the last six years both as part of the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene as well as ace avant-pop group Stars. He’s constantly flip-flopping between both, which leaves him with very little personal time. Which is kinda why his barbeque in downtown Toronto is being interrupted by Australian folks wanting to chat about Stars amazing new album, Set Yourself on Fire.

“I’ve had to completely alter my way of life,” he says of the rapid rise of both bands through the indie ranks. “To give all my energy to these two bands takes my whole life, but it is very rewarding because I get two completely different things out of it because they’re completely different musically. I do two completely different things in the bands, so it keeps both sides of my brain busy.”

Stars’ first record, Heart, showed some New Order influences in its twinkling electronic edges, but new effort Set Yourself On Fire is far above and beyond any real comparison.

“I think with any band you begin by playing your influences on your sleeve,” Evan affirms, “but after six years you reach a point where you have to ask yourself ‘how do we want to sound’. I think with this record we’ve found our sound, and it’s really gelled, and it sounds like us now. We’re the kind of band who are very focussed individuals and we make our physical situation conducive to having to work – we went out into this tiny French village in Quebec in the dead of winter, and wrote and demoed these songs in the basement, and that was only a month. The band was under its own pressure in isolation. We like to just get it done.”

While Stars may be from Toronto, the band actually started in New York when frontman Torquill Campbell and keyboardist and string arranger Chris Seligman founded the group and worked on debut EP Night Songs whilst going to school. Evan and Amy Millan (vocals and guitar) came along shortly thereafter, and so Stars were born.

“New York was a very different place back then,” he says wistfully. “There was a certain freedom there that that place doesn’t have any more, and every time we go there now the place is full of rules of what you can and cannot do, and the rents are skyrocketing, but it was a great place to be creative for a while, and leaving there was a really big part of our creative freedom.”

Another aspect of that came through being part of a burgeoning scene in Canada, with the band spending four years in Montreal. “That’s also a big, big hotbed of music right now, and Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are all great epicentres for a lot of great music right now.”

Why is that?

“I’m glad I’m talking to you about this,” he says as he warms to the conversation, “because we both come from very young countries. I find that we’re not from a rich musical history, and there is a window in the youth of this country for people to create their own art forms and forge a scene that has never really happened here before. That’s kind of what makes it special in that there’s a freedom to make something ‘ours’ here. Canada hasn’t really had, as far as I know (and I’ve been here my whole life), a strong family-based independent music scene before. I don’t know why that hasn’t existed, and I think people feel that it’s really time to create something for Canada, and something for us. Not necessarily a Canadian sound, but with Arts & Crafts and all these bands that play with each other, a sense of community that was never here before.”

Expansive instrumentation abounds on Set Yourself on Fire, with the band really pushing the boundaries of what you can do with ‘indie rock’.

“One thing we have in common,” Evan says of lazy journalistic comparisons between Stars and Canuck pin-ups Arcade Fire, “is lush instrumentation, but I really don’t know why that is. I wouldn’t really call it a ‘sound’, but my community of friends that includes a lot of those bands come from a really good education – we all went to really great music schools as kids and so we’re all pretty well versed instrumentally.”

Set Yourself on Fire seems to be deliberately thematic in terms of lyrics as well, with Campbell and Millan trading occasionally vicious and spiteful verses.

“Everything we do is very deliberate – we’re a very conceptual band,” he explains. “Before we even started writing this record we had a really good idea of what we wanted to say and how we wanted it to sound, and when you’re a pop band I think it’s really important to have really strong conceptual ideas, and you really have to know what you want to say, and we really want to be specific with what we want to do. With pop music, if it’s not specific then I find that it’s not as honest as it could be if you didn’t have an agenda. So the songs and the themes of the record are very personal things that we’ve all gone through, and that’s the kind of band we want to be to people – we want to have this music be a part of their lives because we are so much living what we’re talking about.”

It seems like something of break-up record.

“There was some personal heartbreak, definitely, that totally spoke out on the record,” he says tactically. “A lot of joy and a lot of sadness that we had to talk about. They’re just really great lyrics, and they’re definitely written by a guy who’s been there.”

As the resident multi-instrumentalist on the album – he plays everything from guitar to trombone to bass to bass synth to percussion, and also has a crack at the drums on “He Lied About Death” – Evan admits that translating much of Set Yourself on Fire into the live setting has become a big challenge for the band.

“When Chris and I were writing a lot of the music on this record we wanted to be as grandiose as possible. I think that it’s important to have your records and your live show as two completely different things – when we play live we have a touring guitar player who plays a lot of the string arrangements on his keyboard, and it’s a lot higher energy and a little bit more rocking, because it’s just so direct live and I want to give people a different experience than just putting on the record and having a glass of wine. I want participation in our shows.”

Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire is out now on Arts & Crafts/Shiny, with promises of a tour in January. Evan parts with this gift: “The goal is for the band to stay in a perpetual state of summer for a year.”