Over the surging noise of a Commercial Drive bar on a Friday night, Kyle McLean guffaws and then intones, "The metal war hath begun."

"Hath," he bellows again, just to make sure everybody gets it. The guitarist is referring to the title of a recent article about Lamb of God, but the endearingly silly gravitas is the language of heavy metal, in all its infinite variety.

McLean is joined by guitarist Jordan Bennee and bassist Joel Cannell, and the three of them are here to talk about their band the Next Hundred Years, and their new album Obese Momentum. Along with vocalist-violinist Zeb Pigott-Duggan and drummer Arden Picton, both absent from this summit meeting, the Next Hundred Years hath fought their own metal war, appearing on the bottom end of some of the heaviest stoner rock bills in Vancouver for almost four years.

But if the stoner tag has subsequently stuck to them like resin on a hash pipe, the band outclasses its competition with adventurous musicality, technical sophistication, and a lower-than-average tolerance for what Cannell calls bonehead rock. Obese Momentum opens with "Falcon Nights" (a taut, seething cousin to both Tool's "Prison Sex" and "Vasoline" by the Stone Temple Pilots) and ends with a lusty, waltz-time left turn into fiddle and horns for "Stay Late", which is only one bouzouki short of wine-soaked gypsy-wedding music. Cannell is particularly proud of the latter track, and the way the menace of the first half–with Pigott-Duggan growling mysteriously about "trouble"–then flips so seamlessly into Gogol Bordello territory.

"The girls really like it, and it forces the metalheads to the back of the bar. Or they go home," Cannell chuckles.

"We use '70s tube amps," adds McLean, with an almost imperceptible roll of the eyes. "We all love Kyuss, QOTSA [Queens of the Stone Age], Melvins, a lot of the Seattle stuff. There's a tonality that's somewhat similar but I don't think by any stretch of the imagination we're a stoner rock band. Zeb doesn't sound like any stoner singer I've heard, and there aren't too many violins in stoner rock either."

Indeed, Obese Momentum is riddled with wanton time changes, monumental mood shifts, and imaginative arrangements that hew closer to Isis than Fu Manchu. Its subtleties are such that it takes a few spins to notice, for instance, the way a chicka-chicka guitar part locks with an almost disco drum beat to make "Codebreaker" simultaneously droney and helium-light. When things threaten to get a little too sonically deep or clever-clever, the band throws a big, pop-metal chorus out there, which you'll hear in "1986".

"That's exciting music to me," says McLean. "When you just don't know where it's gonna go."

"I think you need to spend a lot of time to really enjoy this album," adds Bennee, while Cannell name-checks Radiohead as another abiding inspiration on the band's restless muse.

"And I fuckin' hated them," he says with a smirk. "I thought, what is this garbage?"

The bassist managed to ignore one of the most visible bands on the planet until McLean dumped a copy of Kid A on him, and it took up residence in his car stereo, keeping him company on his way to work in Squamish until it got under his skin. "And I'd be singing falsetto to it all the way up," he laughs, "and finally I phoned him up and said, 'Okay, this is cool.'"

Besides the influence of the Oxford-based boffins, Cannell credits sobriety for the artistic leap between TNHY's eponymous 2005 debut and Obese Momentum.

"I don't know how the first album got written," he confesses. "Those songs really came from my reptile brain. And who knows what I lost in the drunk years? I might have been writing Dark Side of the Moon."

"After we finished our first record," McLean continues, "We thought, 'Okay, now we gotta write more songs.' And now we all feel like we're wasting time if we're not working on stuff. You can't just go in and drink a flat of beer and do a bunch of drugs and be productive."

This all makes for an inspiring tale when you consider that McLean, Cannell, and drummer Picton initially arrived in Vancouver from Kamloops in 2000, calling themselves the Bastards of the Universe and starting a brawl at one of their first gigs at the Astoria. It climaxed with a showdown between McLean's kneecap and a bouncer with a lead pipe. The kneecap lost.

Things have clearly improved since then, particularly with the addition of Bennee and Pigott-Duggan in 2004. Hopefully, Obese Momentum will add some nitro to the band's steadily growing reputation, and the Next Hundred Years will take their place alongside Black Betty and Bison as one of Vancouver's heavy-hitters.

There are some things, however, that will probably never change.

"I'm sick of dude groupies, man," sighs Cannell. "There ain't no panties goin' up on that stage, it's just dude groupies. 'What year is that SVT? It's awesome!'"

"'What kind of pedal is that?'" chips in an exasperated McLean. "After 50 times, it's like, 'Where's the chicks and the drugs? I don't want to talk to you about my gear!'"

"Ask me about my mind or my body," says Bennee, hugging himself with mock self-possession. "Not my pedals."