Dave Erickson doesn't come out and say it, but fill in the blanks and you get the sense that Inward Eye's dance with the majors has been anything but painless. Signed in 2006 to J Records by no less than industry legend Clive Davis, the Winnipeg-based trio spent three years working on a debut album, which is scheduled for release this July.

A couple of things stand out when the bassist-singer thinks back to the sessions for the record, which is still untitled. One is the surreality of being marooned in Buttnugget, California, where Inward Eye was sequestered, on and off, for a sanity-testing two years.

"We were living in Temecula, California, which is basically in the middle of nowhere," Erickson reports, on the line from a tour van that's winding its way through Alabama. "It's got, like, a shitty bar and a Wal-Mart and not much else, so we were kind of isolated."

His other main memory is recalled even less fondly. Although he chooses his words carefully, Erickson makes a good case that major labels still shouldn't be let anywhere near new bands that fall under the umbrella of punk rock.

Asked to elaborate on his somewhat evasive statement that there were "so many things going on at that time", he finally bucks up with: "We signed with our record label and it seemed like they were really trying to get something out of us, but we couldn't figure out what that was. They kept on pushing us to write what they considered to be better lyrics, but it turned out that they wanted us to write lyrics that we considered to be worse, to be completely honest. We kept on being pushed to do”¦ I don't know—it was so vague."

Do a bit of digging on how Inward Eye went from flying under the radar on the frozen tundra of Winnipeg to being a priority around the corporate headquarters of Sony, and you could be forgiven for wondering how the band ever ended up invited to the Warped Tour.

Formed in the 'Peg in 1997 by Erickson and his two brothers—Kyle plays guitar and Anders drums—the group is managed by ex-Harlequin axeman Glen Willows. When the group began working on demos to shop, it was under the guidance of producer Arnold Lanni, who helped foist Simple Plan and Our Lady Peace upon the world.

As much as such associations make Inward Eye smell only moderately less prefab than, say, the Jonas Brothers, the group in all fairness makes up for that on EP, a just-released four-song disc.

Taken from the same sessions as the forthcoming album, the disc is a turbocharged, hook-heavy, loud-and-proud distillation of the bands the Ericksons happily trumpet as influences. If you guessed the Clash circa Give 'Em Enough Rope, the Kinks during the garage days, and the Who before beards and bell-bottoms, you probably have a better idea of where Inward Eye is coming from than the suits at J Records do.

Ultimately then, whatever went on down in Temecula, EP proves that the pain was worth it.

"We're happy with the product, and we don't want to get all down on it," Erickson says. "There's no pitch-correction or Auto-Tune—it was done doing a lot of takes. Man, I sung one of those songs every day for a month. But in the end, we got true satisfaction."

Inward Eye plays the Bourbon on Friday (March 27) as part of JunoFest.