It might be unusual for a four-piece rock band to invoke influential jazz and pop mogul Quincy Jones early in an interview. Those bands, however, are not Weaves.

Ramshackle and experimental yet unerringly catchy, the Toronto-based group lives by Jones’ mantra: you have to leave space in a song for God to walk in the room.

“You can’t think the life out of a track,” guitarist Morgan Waters tells the Straight on the line from his family’s cabin at Vancouver Island’s Shawnigan Lake. “Our philosophy is that it’s easy to be weird and improvise, and go on tangents and make noise, and then it’s important to sit down and craft a song. We can come together and play some crazy stuff in a second, and that’s fun—we do it in the live show—but to have a strong backbone of tracks makes it a little more timeless.

“I’m not going to say that a perfect Backstreet Boys song—something with so much thought and craft—is better than a Ween song that’s completely improvised and deranged,” he continues. “They’re both valid. When you mix the two, it’s powerful.”

That ethos has become the foundation of the group’s songwriting. Scooping a nod from the Polaris Prize jury for their 2016 self-titled debut, the four-piece started their career by recording tracks live off the floor, embracing their mistakes and turning them into musical quirks. On the follow-up, 2017’s Wide Open, however, the group tempered its wild energy to craft songs that were more emotional and personal, taking time to scribe lyrics and riffs that were more deliberate without losing their off-the-wall edge.

“It’s hard to be catchy and not cheesy,” Waters says. “But [Singer] Jasmyn [Burke] is special—everything she sings always sounds legit somehow. She has a hard time faking it. On the second record, we really wanted to make it all about the songs. We relaxed a bit. We toured so much that when we came off the road, Jasmyn would go into the rehearsal space, and come up with all these different demos, and we’d work on it together. It was nice to hone it down to pure songwriting.”

Despite their newfound appreciation for craft, however, the band made sure Wide Open bore the hallmarks of its predecessor. The track “Gasoline”, for example, was made at the end of a studio session, taking a voice memo demo from Burke’s phone as its base. Weaves spent 15 minutes jamming out the riff, and chose to add the first and only take to the final record.

Much of that off-the-cuff energy will be on display at the band’s performance at Canada Place on Canada Day. Known for creating spontaneous new versions of songs in a live setting, the band is excited to introduce its idiosyncratic, genre-bending style to a new audience.

“It’s always nice to play in the afternoon, and hopefully in the sun,” says Waters. “And it’s free, so we’ll be playing for people who don’t know us. That way, you can freak people out in different ways. It’s fun when there are families and kids running around—we just played Campbell Bay Music Festival a couple nights ago, and there were a lot of kids’ faces up the front. That fires you up, to see that they are so transfixed by what we’re doing.

“It’s nice when people are able to stumble upon us,” he continues. “It’s a good, happy accident.”

Weaves plays at Canada Place on July 1.

Follow Kate Wilson Twitter @KateWilsonSays