The Fugitives had a pretty good idea what they were shooting for on their new full-length, Everything Will Happen, including what they didn’t want the album to be.

“Well, it’s not a concept record—we weren’t going, ‘Hey, we have to write 12 songs about the Prussian War’ or something like that,” says singer-guitarist Brendan McLeod with a laugh, on his cell from the highway just outside of Regina. “What we more came in with was an idea of the sound that we wanted. We were like, ‘Let’s do a big, anthemic folk sound.’ ”

The band achieves that on Everything Will Happen, a record that often hits regal heights thanks to chamber-pop violin and horn flourishes. The album marks a continued evolution for McLeod and singer-guitarist Adrian Glynn, the two consistent members of a group that, over the past decade, has featured a rotating cast of support players including the likes of C.R. Avery and Mark Berube.

So where, in the past, the Fugitives have blended elements of spoken word and hip-hop into their work, this time the focus is on straight-up folk songs with a distinctively grand feel to them. Things achieve lift-off early on, with the band lighting out for bluegrass heaven on the banjo-powered “Love Affairs”, a track where the bombastic chorus and drum-violence outro almost hit Warped Tour levels of aggression. From there, the album doesn’t lack for beautiful touches, whether ambient cymbal washes and back-porch fiddle on “Wilderness Years” or round-midnight brass and sombre piano on “Ring”.

Everything Will Happen had the duo leaving the West Coast to set up in Toronto with producer John Critchley (Dan Mangan, Amelia Curran) and a cast of smoking hired guns, some of them making the trek from Vancouver (violinist Hannah Epperson and multi-instrumentalist Steve Charles), some of them raided from the fertile Hogtown music scene.

“The good thing about Toronto is that there is no shortage of amazing musicians,” McLeod says.

Focusing was not a problem. In fact, the singer remembers Toronto as a place with few distractions.

“We were stuck in the studio for 12 hours a day for five weeks, so it was pretty intense,” he says.

Intense enough that the Fugitives had more than one bout of wondering whether the direction they were taking was working.

“It’s been nice to hear that people like the record, because when you’re in the studio, no one is hearing what you are doing but you,” McLeod says. “When you throw it out into the world, you’re just happy that someone other than your mom likes it. Being in the studio, you have doubts, like on
the daily.”

Ultimately, Everything Will Happen is the sound of a band showing its mastery of a genre—folk-rock—that’s plenty hot at the moment thanks to the success of international breakout acts like Mumford & Sons and the Head and the Heart. It’s not lost on McLeod that in many ways the tides of pop music have changed to the group’s benefit.

“We’ve been touring with a banjo for eight years,” he notes. “Eight years ago, it was like ‘Um, why do you have a banjo in your band?’ Now it seems completely normal, so things have totally swung around, and hopefully it stays here for a while.”

What hasn’t changed is that McLeod and Glynn continue to keep irons in other artistic disciplines.

“Personally, I’ve just finished a novel, which I’ve just sent away to my editor,” says McLeod, who won a 2006 International 3-Day Novel Contest for his work The Convictions of Leonard McKinley. “Adrian is an actor who is about to do some plays, meaning we’re going to have some downtime for a couple of months before going back out in March.”

That McLeod has an interest in literature that goes deeper than reading the record reviews in Exclaim! is hinted at by the fact Everything Will Happen features songs like “Dinner With Clara Haber”. It’s not often that folks end up writing odes to doomed German chemists from last century, in this case one who was married to chemical warfare pioneer Fritz Haber. When it’s suggested that his earlier Prussian War crack might have been McLeod’s way of acknowledging Haber and the song that name-checks her, he graciously avoids pointing out that such a query exposes a complete and totally buffoonish ignorance of history.

“I just mentioned the Prussian War off the top of my head,” McLeod says, laughing. “She’s more like circa the First World War. That song has a little bit to do with chemical warfare, but it’s more about his [Fritz Haber’s] wife, which is all a roundabout way of getting there. It’s one of those songs that, if you want to go on the Internet and find out stuff about them [the Habers], you can. But if you don’t, you can just listen to the tune as a normal song.”

As opposed to, one assumes, the key piece of a concept record.