Having spent the day chilling in one of the great culinary capitals of the world, Young Empires singer Matt Vlahovich perhaps fittingly reaches for a food metaphor when he describes his band’s approach to songwriting.

“The way I personally see it, it’s like when you’re cooking food for someone,” the Toronto-based frontman says, speaking on his cell from a tour van rolling out of New Orleans. “Sometimes when you’re cooking for someone, a simple meal will work. But we like all the fixings—we want there to be a wide range of flavour profiles in whatever it is we’re eating. When we’re writing songs it’s like that too. It’s all about different textures, like the spices that you put on your food.”

The band’s 2015 full-length The Gates was indeed all about textures. From the space-cowboy synth-funk of “So Cruel” to the starbursting pop of “Mercy”, the songs show a crazy attention to sonic detail, Young Empires leaning winningly on looped vocals, swooping synths, and arena-ready vocals.

A noticeable shift from the band’s considerably more percussion-driven DIY debut EP, Wake All My Youth, the record scored Young Empires a Juno win this year for breakthrough group.

Just as importantly, The Gates caught the attention of enough tastemakers that the trio has been on the road as often as it’s been at home in Toronto, touring both as a headliner and opener for acts ranging from Dragonette and Japandroids to Girl Talk and Vampire Weekend. The countless hours in the tour van have both their advantages and undeniable challenges (not the least of which is that Vlahovich has a young child at home from whom he is often apart for weeks at a time).

“In terms of building a market presence in America, when you don’t have a hit on commercial radio it’s hard,” he says. “It seems like there’s been kind of a decline in the strength of music blogs over the past five years. Now we’re really seeing an upsurgence on Spotify. This is how people are now really finding their music. When we meet new fans, I’d say that 90 percent of them found us on Spotify. That’s definitely changed the dynamic in music. Basically, what it means is if you’re not getting onto these Spotify playlists that have grand exposure, it’s even more challenging to build an audience. Fortunately, we’ve had three songs on The Gates that I think have over a million plays on Spotify.”

It would seem that most of those plays are people living in a major metropolis, which makes sense considering Young Empires’ shimmering, forward-thinking rock sounds like it was made for modern cities of steel and glass. Vlahovich reports that the band indeed does great in big urban centres like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle, with smaller markets being more of a challenge.

But that’s a challenge that he not only is up to, but actually sees as fuel for his art. It’s no accident that, for all its sonic exploring, The Gates ends on an uplifting note with the straight-ahead but sparkling “Uncover Your Eyes”, where Vlahovich starts off with “I used to be afraid of myself so I covered my eyes/I was blinded by the fear of the devil inside” before going on to sing “And now I know and now I see that I’m my own worst enemy.”

“You put a lot on the line when you pursue an artistic passion where there are no certainties,” the singer says. “When there’s no job security, it just adds more anxiety and stress into your daily life, and that definitely affects the songwriting. It’s also the nature of the beast of being in a rock band and touring—there are issues we all deal with, be it alcohol or drugs or whatever. There’s a reason a lot of artists gravitate toward these things and it becomes cyclical. But we want to do this for the next 10 or 15 years, and I think that’s where our optimism comes in, knowing our music is positive and helping people get through some negative times.”

Young Empires plays Fortune Sound Club next Thursday (May 19).