For hard-touring bands, the best way to measure success isn’t always by watching the charts or scanning radio play lists. Halifax’s hipster-approved Wintersleep is finding a new way to gauge its popularity on its current Canadian tour. And, reached in Toronto the morning after a successful, sold-out stand at Lee’s Palace, Loel Campbell isn’t exactly stoked by what he’s been discovering.

“As we’re getting more popular, there are more kind of crazy people coming to our shows,” Wintersleep’s drummer reveals. “Because of that, it’s becoming more like a rock ’n’ roll scene. You know—like after the show freaky people come up to you and they want to hang out and drink. That’s really funny to us, because on nights like last night we’re kind of content to just come back to Paul’s brother’s house and drink tea.”

The Paul that Campbell refers to is Paul Murphy, singer-guitarist of Wintersleep, who initially enlisted the drummer to help flesh out the solo, acoustic-oriented material he’d been working on. From there the band, which today includes bassist Jud Haynes and guitarist Tim D’eon, slowly began to take shape. That’s led to two albums—both of them untitled, including one released last year.

“This whole thing started with Paul fumbling around with some songs that I really enjoyed,” Campbell says. “From there, everything has sort of been an accident. After messing around for eight months we got asked to play live, so we brought in Jud to play bass. We sort of slowly became a band. If you go back and look at our first record it was more of a preconceived, studio kind of project where we started out with acoustic guitar and drum tracks and then went from there.”

The quartet doesn’t totally escape its past on the new album’s tracks like “Fog” and “Listen (Listen, Listen)”, both of which mine the same powerful but stripped-down sound that made Hayden a drone-folk poster boy a decade ago. Mostly, though, the 11-track release shows that Wintersleep has blossomed into one of the country’s most lethal—and, despite its growing numbers of hangers-on, still largely undiscovered—bands. In a good indication of how far left the mainstream has moved over the years, the group specializes in the kind of daydream-nation guitar blitzkriegs that once made Lollapallooza the most cutting-edge festival on the continent and Halifax a grunge-era hotbed. “Lipstick” presents college rock at its most dreamily distorted, “Nerves Normal, Breath Normal” channels Sonic Youth before the major-label years, and “Insomnia” sounds like an indie-obsessed Sigur Rós hot-knifing Black Mountain’s “Druganaut”.

The ultimate triumph of Wintersleep’s sophomore album might be the way it shows, once again, that Halifax is becoming a mecca for the indie nation. Campbell says that’s not entirely inaccurate. And what makes that cooler is that he remembers being a kid when the East Coast was exploding with the kinds of bands that hipsters and heshers alike dreamed of sharing a backstage drink with.

“I’ve been part of the independent scene for, like, nine years now—there’s been all these great bands here like Holy Fuck and Contrived,” the drummer says. “It’s nice to be able to tour with friends in those bands. What’s cool is that we’ve all started playing music for all the right reasons. And that’s what makes the nights when the freaky people show up so weird.”

Wintersleep plays the Plaza on Saturday (December 2).