Europe latched on to Suuns long before North America, which makes sense if you look at the Montreal-based group’s catalogue.

From a 2010 debut, Zeroes QC, to this spring’s dark and complex Hold/Still, the quartet has made music that’s as strange and challenging as it is endlessly rewarding. And if European audiences are famous for anything, it’s being raptly attentive to acts that treat music as something more akin to art. Suuns belongs in that category.

“When we first started and put out our first record, we weren’t expecting anything, so everything was kind of a gain,” singer-guitarist Ben Shemie says, on the line from Montreal, a city he’s just returned to after a successful three-week European tour. “What happened at first was that in Europe we were selling out shows even though we’d never done that in our hometown. But things are beginning to catch up here. We’re getting good press for the new record.”

The positive reviews for Hold/Still are deserved, with Suuns proving to be a kindred spirit of acts like Radiohead and Man Man. Like those renegades, the band exists to push the boundaries of guitar rock. On Hold/Still, things get off to a riotously discordant start with “Fall”, an exercise in claustrophobia marked by thumpingly blown-out drums and fragmented six-string. The distortion in “Instrument” was obviously designed to sizzle your grey matter, while “Brainwash” is all sugary art-pop that explodes into car-crash guitar violence halfway through.

One of the goals of Hold/Still—which was produced by John Congleton (St. Vincent, Swans)—was to capture how the band sounds when it’s happiest: playing live.

“Our recordings are cool, but the biggest challenge we’ve always faced,” Shemie says, “is ‘How do we bottle up the energy of this band when we are on-stage?’ We worked with a producer that was into doing something different. It’s way more live-off-the-floor than our past records, hardly any overdubs, and first or second takes of almost everything. John made us sound the way that we sound.”

The challenge now, Shemie says, is to re-create the more out-there parts of an experimental record on-stage. And judging by the recent reactions in Europe, fans are as open to things going off in new directions as the band was on Hold/Still.

“We’ve got a record that’s just that: a record, a recording of a particular time,” Shemie says. “And when we play those songs live now, they are definitely more aggressive, more amplified in every way. We have two different gears. And more so than the studio, we excel in the live gear.”

Suuns plays the Rickshaw Theatre on Friday (June 17) as part of Levitation Vancouver.