Lyn Heinemann has only done a few interviews so far regarding her new band, but she has already identified one question she isn’t fond of. Making a mental note not to ask her what the one thing everyone should know about Drawn Ship is, the Straight sits down at Bandidas Taquería on Commercial Drive to chat with the singer-guitarist and drummer Gregg Steffensen.

That, in fact, is the whole band. As ably demonstrated by acts including the White Stripes and No Age—not to mention Vancouver’s very own Japandroids and the Pack a.d.—you can make a hell of lot of noise with an electric six-string and a drum kit. Drawn Ship, on the other hand, has chosen a different path. Rather than relying on volume or distortion to fill things out, the duo tends to keeps things spare and dry, but the apparent simplicity is deceiving. As she did when leading her previous band Portico, Heinemann delivers straightforward melodies that are twisted around some irregular rhythms. She insists, however, that she’s rarely aware of what time signature her songs are in.

“When it’s 4/4, I know it,” she says. “But other than that…I just never bothered to learn. I know 3/4, too.”

Don’t think for a second, though, that Drawn Ship is akin to a pared-down prog band. As it proves on its just-released debut album, Low Domestic, the duo plays indie rock that’s accessible to those who couldn’t be bothered to count the beats per measure.

“People who aren’t very musically inclined will be talking to us, and they won’t notice that there’s weird time signatures on the album, except for one track,” Steffensen says. “They think it’s just normal. And I think that’s sort of how Lyn writes it. It’s not intentionally disjointed. It kind of has a natural flow to it.”

That free-flowing feel is aided by Steffensen’s approach to beat-keeping. Having no bass with which to lock in rhythmically, the drummer follows Heinemann’s lead closely, giving her quirky timing a solid foundation without unnecessary fills. Steffensen says Heinemann’s songwriting forced him to rethink the way he plays.

“I was just trying to figure out the time signatures,” he admits, “so I’d be playing along, like, the most simple beat. But then I just kind of fell in love with the way that sounded—playing together. And I was trying to figure out in my head how the best way to have a two-piece sound was, and that was to play together, as opposed to me playing a drum part overtop of a completely different guitar part.”

Low Domestic is focused squarely on the interplay between Heinemann and Steffensen, but it wasn’t just a two-person effort. Shawn Penner, who also co-produced and engineered the album (along with Aaron Nordean) played guitar on all but one of the 11 songs; Hannah Georgas added backing vocals on six of them, and Greg Williams provided subtle keyboard textures to five. Also taking the journey with Drawn Ship is Keith Parry, who agreed to release Low Domestic through his label, Scratch Records, one of this city’s longest-running and most-respected indies.

Heinemann is understandably thrilled to be on the label that helped launch the careers of acts like Black Mountain and Destroyer, but she admits that Parry needed some convincing. After all, these are dark times for all record companies great and small.

“We harassed Keith until he said ‘yes,’ ” she says.

“To use a tired cliché, we wanted to keep it local,” Steffensen says of Drawn Ship’s dogged pursuit of Scratch. “We really wanted to not have a label in some other city, or communicate over the Net and stuff. Our first goal was to try something local, so we literally made a list of labels in town, found the ones that suited our music, first off, and went from there. And the list is extremely short, as I’m sure you know.”

One of the main things that impressed Parry was that Drawn Ship is, as Heinemann puts it, “doing it for the right reasons. He likes the songs,” she says, “and he was like, ‘You guys aren’t making any money, so you must really love this. Let’s go for it.’ ”

Parry must be counting on the duo’s songs striking a chord with listeners—and a minor-key chord at that. Heinemann admits that the batch of material that became Low Domestic started off as a collection of break-up songs. Several of those clearly survived—witness the refreshingly blunt “Sick With the Sound” and “You Only”—but her range of topics broadened, even if the stories didn’t get any more cheerful. “Glass Eye” is a harrowing meditation on life and death in the Downtown Eastside, “Adventure Series” tells of a young pilot’s fiery death in World War II, and “Execution” gives a graphic description of the shooting of Thomas Scott during the Louis Riel-led Red River Rebellion in 1870.

“I wasn’t consciously like, ‘I’m gonna write fucked-up songs about horrible stuff,’ ” Heinemann insists. “I guess when things are dark it’s a little more interesting. It’s more interesting to write about an execution and all the imagery that goes with it than to write about playing with your bunny in your back yard or whatever.”

By the time this Local Motion column sees print, Drawn Ship will have played “Execution” in Riel country. When the Straight meets up with the two musicians, they are getting ready for a tour of Western Canada that will see them loading their gear into a tiny hatchback and driving out as far as Winnipeg. Only six shows, but that’s plenty as far as Heinemann is concerned. “It’s partially getting time off work and partially being really pregnant; that distance felt really comfortable. I don’t want Gregg to be delivering the baby, like, outside of Thunder Bay, you know?”

“I definitely don’t want that,” the drummer chips in.

Oh, what the hell: what is the one thing that everyone should know about Drawn Ship? “We’re comin’ to your town, and we’re gonna rip this fucker down,” Steffensen snarls, to which his bandmate succinctly adds, “What he said.”

Drawn Ship plays a homecoming CD-release show at Artbank on Saturday (September 24).