A lot of territory gets covered during a 40-minute conversation with Greys singer Shehzaad Jiwani, the frontman proving as entertaining as he is illuminating.

The Torontonian eloquently holds forth on everything from the culture-shifting gentrification of his hometown to the everyman genius of seminal alt pioneers the Replacements. The crippling nature of depression surfaces—as it does on Greys’ towering new album, Outer Heaven—as does the band’s affection for films that reach for something bigger than popcorn-scented escapism.

When it’s pointed out to Jiwani that he might be one of the most quotable guys working in modern rock ’n’ roll, he doesn’t disagree.

“I’m full of good quotes,” he says with a laugh on his cell from a tour van rolling across Saskatchewan. “And I appreciate you saying so.”

Ask him, then, what Greys were shooting for sonically on the distortion-glazed and beautifully punishing Outer Heaven, and you get an answer that’s actually original. Even though Michael Azerrad’s essential book Our Band Could Be Your Life has already come up a couple of times in the conversation, Jiwani resists the urge to name-check Hüsker Dü, Big Black, and other alternative forefathers whose shadows loom large over his band.

“The vision was to have a lot of space,” Jiwani explains. “We’d kind of conceptualized the record before we’d written any songs because we knew what we wanted to accomplish. I wanted the record to sound the way that a Stanley Kubrick movie looks. Like, if you were to take every shot in a Stanley Kubrick movie and put it on a piece of paper, you’d see all sorts of different sets and colours, but it’s still cohesive as a movie despite all the different environments. That’s what we wanted our record to sound like.”

Outer Heaven is all about texturing; check out the way that “Complaint Rock” dissolves into a messy pool of red-lined guitar violence, or how “Blown Out” is powered by drums on a mission to wreck everything in sight.

The album is also about rewriting the rules of punk, postpunk, and alternative rock—something that was standard practice in the ’80s and ’90s but got lost when fringe bands started landing lucrative record deals. Consider “Strange World” taking a six-string blowtorch to slacker rock, or how “My Life as a Cloud” wraps up an unrelenting exorcism of a record on an almost spacey and serene note. Such moments are a sign Greys are open to all ideas when the tape starts rolling.

“We’re pretty meticulous in the studio, even though I know it can sound kind of chaotic,” Jiwani notes. “We’re regimented with the chaos, and we’re pretty chaotic with our regimen.”

That discipline has Greys on the forefront of one of the most exciting scenes in North America. Sorry, Toronto-haters, but the Centre of the Universe is booming like Seattle, Minneapolis, and Chicago back in the Our Band Could Be Your Life years. Fittingly, Jiwani is not only proud, but eloquent in his assessment of where things are at.

“I don’t want Toronto’s scene to explode, and maybe that’s selfish,” he offers. “I would like things to remain sustainable, and I find that the worst thing that can happen to a music community is success. Right now, even the biggest bands in the scene are still working at bars and restaurants. That puts things in perspective to where it makes the scene mean more—people are doing it because they love it, as opposed to it being a job, and that’s why the music is so good.”

Greys play the Cobalt on Friday (June 3).