Malcolm Biddle is spending a spectacularly sun-kissed spring afternoon doing what he does best: making weird-ass music.

When the Straight catches up with him, he’s in his shed studio in the back lot behind a Mount Pleasant bar, showing off a recent tune from his band, Dada Plan. It’s not, mind you, one of the 10 tracks found on the group’s new The Madness Hides full-length, but rather a jingle for Neptoon Records that’ll be coursed through the PA between songs at an upcoming record-release party.

A pastel-coloured effects pedal triggers what sounds like the pitch-shifted voice of Satan, who sounds more friendly than foreboding as his bowel-rumbling baritone asks comically: “Have you heard old-school vinyl records are back?”

Biddle smiles big as the commissioned piece works itself into an advertorial perversion of mechanized bossa nova beats, Residents-style odd-pop subversion, and a hook that stupefies with its rhyming of “new, used, and local in stock” with “blues, folk rock, and rock”. It’s gleefully absurd, but, well, what isn’t with Dada Plan?

Since forming in 2013, the quintet—guitarist-vocalist Biddle, his sax-blasting brother Dave, keyboardist Matt Krysko, bassist Colin Cowan, and conga player Justin Williams—has disseminated two conceptual LPs that juxtapose an escapist blend of narcoleptic soft jazz and psych-pop with thought-stirring, occasionally ominous commentary on the relationship between man and machine.

Like last year’s A Dada Plan Is Free, The Madness Hides is equally hilarious and depressing in portraying everyday interactions with technology. On the title cut, Biddle’s coolly sung “reward yourself by checking your emails” sounds downright silly—until you consider how countless tech junkies are unable to walk more than a couple of blocks without checking their Gmail and Instagram accounts. Just as upsetting is “Helpless”, a tranquil tune that closes with a numbed and defeated “Should I pretend that I never wanted to look/At pictures of friends more than read some complicated book?”

“There’s nothing to be gained from a constant stream of information that’s already catered to you anyways,” Biddle says, adding that much of The Madness Hides is themed around how people construct their online profiles. The artist isn’t antitechnology, mind you—the interview was set up over email, and Biddle has a Facebook profile. But if you’ve caught Dada Plan live, you may have noticed the lone sticker on Biddle’s lefty Telecaster is of a flip phone trapped beneath the familiarly prohibitive crimson “no” symbol. He’s got to draw a line somewhere.

“I’m too prone to habitually being a drone, or zoning out. I need to limit myself,” Biddle explains of his decision not to carry a space-grey iPhone 6 in his pocket.

While A Dada Plan Is Free featured songs Biddle wrote before starting the group, The Madness Hides was fully conceived by the five-piece. The album title is key, with Biddle explaining Dada Plan’s goal was to “make a pop record that is secretly really strange”.

On that front, “Helpless” is pushed off-course with a seasick synth drone and a drunk-and-stumbling piano solo; “The History of Mirrors” flips the mood with sinister sax melodies; and “Into the Violence” forsakes Dada Plan’s new-age appeal with rusty-chainsaw metal shredding.

“The weirdness leaks out eventually,” Biddle explains. “This is demented shit beneath the pop.”

Behind the frontman during the interview sits a stack of record jackets screenprinted by him and local rocker Johnny de Courcy, for whom Biddle has produced an album and an upcoming EP. The text-heavy cover notes that The Madness Hides was made “in celebration of a lost decade”. The Dada Plan singer says the heading is tongue-in-cheek, but does wonder how we’ll look at this part of history further down the line.

“It’s almost this lost decade, maybe a transitional decade where we accidentally looked at phones for 10 years. This is just the recap of it, a representation. It’s not supposed to be definitive,” he explains.

“So Informative” further laments the IRL communication breakdown by including a nostalgic speech from veteran Vancouver Island folk musician Willie Thrasher about being a longhaired youth running “wild under the great northern lights”. The sample, which Biddle recorded at a show last winter at the Lido, acts as an optimistic salve for our electronic-device addiction.

“We could be sitting at home in front of a computer screen seeing how many likes we got for a post, or we could be running free under the great northern lights. I just keep reminding myself that,” Biddle says, though he admits we may be a bit too far gone down the fibre-optic rabbit hole to find salvation in the stars.

“You can’t just say ‘Connect with nature’ to people. That seems obvious! But ‘Don’t connect to the Wi-Fi,’ that’s more relevant.”

Dada Plan plays a free record-release party for The Madness Hides at the Western Front on Saturday (April 25).