So you’ve released four records, won $150,000 in the PEAK Performance Project battle of the bands competition, and written and directed an acclaimed movie, Violent, that was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Where do you go next?

For Vancouver’s eclectic We Are the City, the solution seemed obvious.

“We recorded a new album in secret,” singer-keyboardist Cayne McKenzie tells the Straight on the line from his Vancouver home. “My day-to-day was bizarre. Every day I’d go in disguise to the studio, which wasn’t actually a studio. No one apart from my girlfriend knew we were making the record.”

While conventional wisdom and a $1,000-per-hour publicist will confirm that it’s probably best to make as much noise as possible around a new release, the trio had a different plan. Donning false mustaches and deleting their social media, We Are the City went off the grid to innovate a new approach to launching an album.

Premiering Above Club with an online broadcast last November, the boys introduced the tracks by video-streaming their recording sessions live from Serbia.

Except the band wasn’t in eastern Europe at all.

As the broadcast ran, We Are the City was still at home in Vancouver.

“We always wanted to do a fake live stream to make a statement about social media,” McKenzie says. “The Internet allows people to present a really idealized version of their life. Everybody on social media puts on an act, and you only see the good parts of a person’s existence. Our aim was to show that you can’t believe everything you see.”

Fans of We Are the City’s dramatic prog-rock have come to expect the unexpected—and for good reason. Since forming in Kelowna in 2008, the band has pushed conceptual and musical boundaries.

Using abstract time signatures and avant-garde videography, the group typically works outside of pop-music conventions—but while it would have been easy to make another record like 2013’s critically admired Violent, We Are the City’s members are more interested in challenging themselves as much as their listeners.

With Above Club’s “Lovers in All Things” abruptly sampling ambient club noise, and “Sign My Name Like QUEEN” backed by a drumbeat that hits more offbeats than on-, the group’s latest album sees McKenzie and fellow band members Andrew Huculiak and David Menzel open a more experimental, but much punchier, chapter.

“We’re proud of what we’ve done in the past,” McKenzie says. “But let me put this into the most relatable example. Imagine you’re in Grade 10, and you make this collage that you’re so happy with. You’ve got great magazine clippings, your boyfriend’s name is in there with hearts around it, and your teacher has written an inside joke with you on the back. And then you frame it, and decide you have it as the centrepiece of your living room forever more. That’s what We Are the City’s back catalogue is like.

“This new record is different,” he continues, “and we wanted to make a clean break. I think in our past work, we’ve been quite self-indulgent. We didn’t want to make another record like that. Above Club was designed so you could listen to any song on its own without thinking too much about what the music meant. With albums like Violent, we were all about interludes, instrumentals, and tying the lyrics together to make a cohesive story. Above Club just pops.”

The record’s maturity is even more remarkable because it was largely improvised. Marking a sonic and logistical departure from We Are the City’s typical modus operandi, Above Club saw the band head into the recording booth without demoing a note.

“A lot of lyrics, in particular, are completely off-the-cuff,” McKenzie says. “In one of the tracks, there’s an improvised pre-chorus with the line ‘Whatever God is, it’s here with me now.’ I’ve thought a lot about spirituality in my life, and David was definitely raised in a very Christian setting. When we play shows people often cheer really loudly at those kind of lyrics—we have a pretty big Christian fan base.

“But those lines are really a protest for me: they’re deliberately anti-Christian. I don’t really know why they came out. But faith works on a lot of different levels, and I think our music does too.”

After musing at length about spirituality, McKenzie is steadfast in his conviction that everybody needs a higher power to believe in—and for the singer, it’s the band. As We Are the City gets set for a new round of touring that will take it through Canada and Germany, McKenzie is thankful that the group has stuck together for so long.

“We keep having conversations where we’re like, ‘Oh man. I can’t believe that we’re here,’ ” he says. “We were just a few guys in a basement jamming on my dad’s old synthesizers. And now we’re playing to hundreds of people all across the world. We’re being thrown into situations and shows that are just spectacular.

“We’ve made connections at the right time, and they’ve led us to where we are now. It’s not necessarily true that we are the best, or that we deserve success. We lucked out, man, and we know it.”

We Are the City plays the West 4th Avenue Khatsahlano Street Party on Saturday (July 9).