Jordan Miller is living proof that a willingness to go above and beyond for one’s art can forever alter an impressionable concertgoer’s destiny. The singer-bassist for the Beaches says that’s one of the reasons she ended up pursuing a career in the trenches of balls-out rock ’n’ roll.

“I think it’s really important to go to live shows if you want to be in a band,” the relentlessly pleasant Torontonian says, on the line from home. “There was this show that I saw in Glasgow that changed the way that I looked at music. I was there on tour with my high school and I saw this band called Fat White Family and it was the most bizarre, crazy live show that I’ve ever seen. The lead singer covered himself in mayonnaise and threw himself at audience members for, like, three minutes. It was so weird, but he didn’t care, and the songs were so, so good. The only thing is I don’t think that I could ever do that because I’d get tons of acne if I put a bunch of mayonnaise on my face.”

Luckily for Miller, the Beaches have taken off without her having to resort to mayo facials or rolling around in peanut butter and broken glass. Thanks to the strength of the hard-edged, muscle-flexing debut, Late Show, the quartet has emerged as something of an anomaly in 2018: a rock ’n’ roll band that someone under the age of 40 actually cares about. Recent accomplishments have included, but are hardly limited to, taking home a 2018 Juno for breakout band of the year, and selling out T.O.’s 950-seat Opera House.

“You never think in your wildest dreams that these things are going to happen to you and that people will appreciate your music,” Miller says. “It’s been wild, but we try and stay grounded and remember that it’s all about having fun and playing together.”

If those sound like the words of someone who is grateful for everything that’s come the Beaches’ way, that’s not by accident. Along with her sister and Beaches guitarist Kylie Miller, Miller has been playing in bands since her early high-school years. When the Beaches began attracting label attention, everyone had a different opinion on what the band—members of which were in their teens—should sound like. After 2014’s EP Heights leaned toward post-Killers pop that was heavy on the synths, the group spent time in Los Angeles working with proven hit-making songwriters who taught Miller plenty while at the same time muddying the waters.

“Most of us are in our early 20s, and when we first started this project we’d just gotten out of high school,” Miller says. “When we first signed to an American label they didn’t know what to do with us. So they sent us on a bunch of writing trips through a developmental deal, and we wrote upwards of 60 songs, working with a different producer every day. It was great learning how to write from some of the most important producers and writers in the music industry. But it was also scary because we weren’t writing for ourselves.”

So the Beaches—which includes keyboardist Leandra Earl and drummer Eliza Enman-McDaniel—returned to Toronto and thought long and hard about what they wanted to be. Tapping into a childhood love of ’70s hard rock, they enlisted Metric’s Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw as producers and then hit the studio. The end result is a record heavy on razor-burn guitar and TNT megariffage, with hard-candy bangers like “Gold” sounding like they were made for road-tripping in a ’74 Dodge Charger. Smartly, though, the Beaches don’t root themselves in one era, with “T-Shirt” dripping enough attitude to impress first-wave Chrissie Hynde, and “Money” suggesting a healthy obsession with the ’00s New York rawk revival headed up by the Strokes.

Late Show’s strength is that it makes rock ’n’ roll sound not only fresh at a time when the genre has stagnated in the shadow of hip-hop and EDM, but also kind of cool. Good luck getting Miller to acknowledge that, though—she’ll leave that to people who don’t think twice about smearing themselves in mayonnaise and then letting loose.

“Being cool is totally what we’re not about; if you’ve seen any of our videos,” she says with a laugh. “You can’t change who you are, which is another way of saying you can’t be cool if you’re not cool.”

The Beaches play Venue on Saturday (April 21).