As career strategies go, it’s kind of an odd one. Toronto-based dark-pop unit the Balconies last came out with a record in February of 2012, the release in question being a riff-heavy EP titled Kill Count. Over much of the past year the group has been at work on an as-yet-untitled follow-up scheduled for release sometime in 2013. That protracted period of having nothing to push productwise isn’t stopping the group from making its way across Canada for a summer tour.

“We felt like it was time to hit markets [like Vancouver] as a headlining group before the hoopla comes around for the album and stuff,” bassist Steve Neville says, on the line from his hometown of Ottawa, where he’s visiting friends and family. “We wanted to remind people that, yep, we’re still around, something new is coming soon, and stay tuned because we’ll be back and hopefully be bigger too.”

The Balconies have already built a solid following in their adopted city, to the point where moving to the Centre of the Universe made sense from a business perspective. The new locale enables the band to make an easy trek to nearby hellholes—errr, cities—like Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, St. Catharines, and London.

The move also made one of the group’s founding members happy. The Balconies were started as a trio by Neville, his singer-guitarist sister Jacquie, and drummer Liam Jaeger. While the siblings are from the nation’s capital, Jaeger hails from Hogtown and was eager to return. The Nevilles had a good reason for wanting to accommodate him, this having something to do with the fact that, in addition to drumming, he has a master’s degree in classical guitar.

“When we started writing the record, we realized that it made more sense for him to play guitar because we needed another guitar player, especially one with Liam’s proficiency,” Neville says. “We decided that Liam is a great guitarist, so he might as well be our lead guitarist, and then we’ll get a new drummer.”

There’s a good case to be made, based on Kill Count, that things weren’t exactly broken in the Balconies camp, with the record working as a bridge between the old new wave of Blondie and the electro-tinged alt-rock of Garbage.

Still, the bassist promises that the next record will take the group in a new, even more guitar-heavy pop direction. Hopefully, he says, that will increase the band’s already sizable fanbase in Toronto and make the idea of touring Canada with no new product to push seem just a little less crazy.

Not that hitting the road between records seems to be of any concern to the Balconies.

“We did a tour supporting the band the Rival Sons back in March, and then did one in the Netherlands and the U.K. on our own,” Neville says. “It went so excellent that we’re going back in September to do Germany and the Netherlands. They just have a different appreciation of music—there’s a different energy in the room, with people really enthusiastic.”

To the point where Europeans evidently don’t care if the Balconies have had nothing to sell since Kill Count.

“Then again,” Neville says, “it might have something to do with our band being a bit of a novelty over there. It’s not like Canada, where we are just locals.”