Early-morning interviews can be difficult, especially when the interviewer has spent the night wrestling with insomnia.

That’s a state Carl Newman knows well, however, and the New Pornographers frontman is not only sympathetic but insightful when your groggy correspondent reaches him at home in Woodstock, New York.

“Have you ever heard of second sleep or segmented sleep?” the former Vancouverite asks from three time zones away. “In pre-industrial times, people used to sleep for about four hours, like when the sun went down, roughly, and in the middle of the night they would be up for a few hours. It was a regular thing for people to be up and visit people or whatever, and then they would go back to bed and sleep for another four hours. I think that most people, in their life, have noticed that sometimes they sleep like that.…And you’ll think there’s something wrong with you, but it’s very possible that your body is just trying to sleep the way it wanted to sleep before the industrialized world forced us into very specific sleep patterns.

“Maybe it is a creative-person thing,” he adds. “The best thing I can possibly do is just get up and read, or even work, or try and write. Although sometimes you just want to lie in bed in a stupor, and that works, too.”

Judged on the evidence of the New Pornographers’ new full-length, Brill Bruisers, Newman hasn’t had much time to doze in recent months, although it’s entirely possible that he burned more than a few barrels of midnight oil during the disc’s creation. Despite the title track’s oblique nod to the pop songwriters who once inhabited New York City’s Brill Building, much of the record is built on a foundation of amped-up guitars and pumped-up rhythms. In a word, it’s celebratory, a term Newman used during early discussions of the record and now somewhat regrets.

“You know what the problem with that is?” he says. “Sometimes people want you to describe your record in one word, and you just blurt out a word, and then you have to defend it for the next six months. I mean, there is sort of a celebratory aspect to it, in the same way that our records have always had a celebratory aspect. I think it’s very defiant. It’s, like, trying to be happy in the face of all the shit that the world throws at you.”

The world did throw some shit at various members of the New Pornographers following the 2010 release of their previous effort, Together. Most notably, both Newman and his niece, singer-keyboardist Kathryn Calder, lost their mothers, and made solo records based on that sad experience. There’s little overt sorrow to be heard on Brill Bruisers, and Newman credits the therapy of making Shut Down the Streets with helping him get through his period of mourning.

“I felt like I had to make that record, and once I made it I didn’t feel the need to write songs like that anymore,” he notes. “I was just talking with somebody about that, how if I’d not made that record and just jumped into Brill Bruisers, I would have felt completely full of shit. I would have felt like a liar. It would have felt really dishonest to skip something in my life which was so big and massive and just pretend it never happened. So once that record was made, I thought, ‘Okay, that record is done. Now I can do this.’

“It’s still personal, but in a very different way,” he adds. “Like, the song ‘Wide Eyes’ is, lyrically, not that different than something on Shut Down the Streets—but on Shut Down the Streets I think I was worried about being a dad, and with ‘Wide Eyes’ I thought, ‘Okay, I think I might have this. I think I’m going to be all right.’ ”

That confidence certainly carried over into Brill Bruisers’ opening and closing tracks. The title number is arguably the catchiest thing the New Pornographers have ever recorded, with an irresistible earworm of a choral into. Twelve songs later, the anthemic “You Tell Me Where” manages to be both Newman’s passionate declaration of love for his wife and a tough-as-nails mission statement for a band that is still determined to grow, 14 years and six albums into its career.

“I like opening up an album just like bursting out of the gate, where arguably the biggest hook is in the first second of the album,” the singer-guitarist says. “In this day of lapsed attention spans, I thought that was a good move. And I’ve always loved the idea of ending the album with an epic. It just seems right to me.”

The New Pornographers play the Commodore Ballroom on Friday (October 3).