When it came time to record their fourth studio album, Hope & Ruin, Canadian guitar rockers the Trews returned to the pattern of their 2003 full-length debut, House of Ill Fame, which was written and recorded while they were living together in Niagara Falls. This time around, the Nova Scotia–bred quartet of singer Colin MacDonald, guitarist John-Angus MacDonald, bassist Jack Syperek, and drummer Sean Dalton holed up at the Tragically Hip’s Bathouse, a studio that’s a converted old house outside Kingston, Ontario.

“That was the first time since our first album that we were waking up in the morning and putting coffee on, then passing guitars around,” explains John-Angus, on the line from the band’s current base of Toronto. “By dinner time we usually had something we felt like we wanted to work on, and then after that we’d start recording, and usually by midnight—as in, like, 2, 3 in the morning—we’d have something finished.”

Another constant presence at the Bathouse during the Hope & Ruin sessions was Hip bassist Gord Sinclair, but he wasn’t there just to make sure the Maritimers didn’t trash the place. Sinclair produced the new album along with MacDonald, and earned a songwriting credit on 11 of its 12 tracks.

“Gord brought an amazing objectivity,” notes MacDonald, “and he was great at pushing us in a direction we might not have gone before. We had fallen into this habit of doing very similar things with arrangements, and he was sort of planting seeds, suggesting bridges and changes and just letting us know when we’ve peaked and should maybe move on.”

As well as writing and producing, Sinclair also played a bit of harmonica and guitar, and on the churning “The World, I Know” he injected the propulsive bass stylings that have underpinned so many great Hip tunes over the years.

“The genesis of that song was a chord change that Jack had written on guitar,” recalls MacDonald, “so he thought it more appropriate that he should play guitar. And since we’ve got the bass player from one of the greatest Canadian bands there with us anyway, why not throw him on bass?”

After Sinclair put his stamp on Hope & Ruin’s collection of anthemic rockers and yearning ballads, he sent the music west so that famed mixer Mike Fraser (AC/DC, Aerosmith, Metallica) could do his thing at Warehouse Studio in Gastown. At that point, MacDonald wasn’t sure how much of an effect Fraser’s expert knob-twiddling would have on the finished product.

“Not taking anything away from Mike—he has amazing rock ’n’ roll instincts, and his résumé reads like a playlist I would put together—but I just thought, ”˜The parts are all there, what more can change?’ We thought it sounded pretty good already, so we weren’t expecting much.

“But an incredible sonic depth is what he added,” continues MacDonald. “It went from being two-dimensional to three-dimensional, is the only way I can describe it. He used some stuff that we had mixed way down and thought would never be heard from again, and he really brought the drum sound to life. It was like night and day.”

The Trews play the Roxy on Tuesday (April 26).