For all that Clementine Creevy has accomplished at the age of 22, there’s plenty on the new Cherry Glazerr record Stuffed & Ready to suggest that she’s sometimes every bit as confused as the rest of us.

Reached in a tour van that’s headed to Denver, the thoughtful frontwoman suggests that is indeed the case. Consider, she suggests, the mantra “Don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous” that serves as the backbone of the dream-hazed shoegazing diamond “Juicy Socks”. On the surface, Creevy is addressing her fellow Americans, specifically the disenfranchised who are stressed about their place in Donald Trump’s increasingly intolerant United States.

But Creevy admits that she was also sending a specific person a message when writing “Juicy Socks”.

“When I say, ‘Don’t be nervous,’ I’m really talking to myself,” she reveals. “When Trump was elected, I had a physiological reaction to it. My first thought was ‘What if I need an abortion and can’t get access to one?’ That’s just physically threatening to me and so many others who have to deal with even worse things. It’s a joke and it feels like a dream, and I can’t normalize it.”

Give her credit, then, for doing her best to make sense of things in a chaotic time. And also for continuing to push forward and challenge herself not only as a songwriter, but also as a person who’s able to accept that flaws come with the package, even if they aren’t always visible.

“I see my music as a place where I am able to be honest with myself,” Creevy says. “Or at least I try to be honest. My music is sometimes the only place where I’m able to do that­—where I’m able to put the thoughts and feelings that I normally can’t articulate with words into song.”

As critically lauded as Cherry Glazerr has been over its half-decade run, Stuffed & Ready is a record that shows a really good band setting its sights on greatness. Noticeably less polished than Apocalipstick, the record doesn’t lack for dream-candy guitars and challenge-everything vocals, both there in full force on tracks like “Isolation” and “Stupid Fish”.

But Creevy also shows herself as an artist who’s not afraid to let her vulnerabilities show, both musically and lyrically. Backed by pillowy synths and watery guitar, “Daddi” has her questioning her own complicity in relationships where she’s been nowhere as strong as she is in real life. The downtempo meditation “Self Explained”, meanwhile, has her admitting “I don’t want people to know how much time I spend alone.”

“I think what I was trying to prove on past records,” Creevy says, “is that I was a capable songwriter and musician who tended to sort of maximize things and use a lot of metaphors and overcomplicate things as far as lyrics and arrangements go. With this album, I really tried to practise trusting myself. I think that resulted in it being a more straightforward and simplified album where I’m really just talking about my self-reflective tendencies.”

Logic would suggest that the singer has few reasons to question her place on the planet. Cherry Glazerr pretty much took off right from the point when a 15-year-old Creevy began posting her work on SoundCloud. Following the release of a debut EP, Papa Cremp, on indie heavyweight Burger Records, the group promptly established itself as a dark-horse fave at its first South By Southwest appearance.

Subsequent full-lengths Haxel Princess (2014) and Apocalipstick (2017) positioned Creevy as one of the most ferocious and uncompromising young talents in underground alt-pop. Not content with planting her flag in a single discipline, she worked tirelessly to establish herself as a multiple threat, dabbling in the fashion industry as a model for Yves Saint Laurent and landing on the small screen with a recurring role on the award-winning Amazon Prime series Transparent. Recognizing her as a force cut from the same fabric as culture-shifting renegades like Kathleen Hanna and Courtney Love, arbiters of all things cool VICE turned the camera on her for the 2017 short doc “Clementine Creevy: The Millennial Punk Feminist Icon”.

But for all her conquests, Creevy found that perception didn’t always match reality when she was alone.

“I think we all feel to a certain extent that we want outside validation,” she says. “I want to think that I’m larger than life, but I’m actually just a nervous person. I can really overthink stuff. So I try to practise trusting myself and I try to practise not beating myself up.”

With Stuffed & Ready, she also learned to channel her dark periods into something healthy. Looking back, she sees Apocalipstick as an exuberant, if sometimes wide-eyed, call to arms, that borne out by her adrenaline-overdrive performances on songs like “Told You I’d Be With the Guys” and “Sip O’ Poison”.

Relentless touring for that record left her with lots of downtime in hotels, tour vehicles, and green rooms, not always the best thing for one’s mental health.

“I do struggle with loneliness even when I’m not alone,” Creevy acknowledges. “I wasn’t realistically alone, but I think I was struggling to grasp meaning in my life. Then I came to the conclusion in ‘Stupid Fish’ where I talk about how we’re all just talking monkeys hurtling through space trying to survive, with none of us really knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow. We’re all in the dark hoping for the best.”

That idea of looking into the light coloured much of Stuffed & Ready. The record is packed with references to those times when everything seems pointless and futile; consider “I wish myself the best, but I’m broken/The light inside my head went dead, and I turned off” from the distortion-glazed kickoff, “Ohio”, and then “I don’t see nobody, anybody for three days/I wanna be alone” from the doomsday outro, “Distressor”.

But what’s equally important to think about is what motivated Creevy when she was writing Stuffed & Ready, namely the conviction that you can’t let the inner demons win, even when the struggle gets real. For all she’s done, that might be her biggest accomplishment of all.

“I’ve created a few practices for myself as I’ve gotten older,” she says. “One of my practices is not beating myself up, and another is not stressing myself. Another is seeing myself as a capable human being. This has created a lot of meaning in my life. It’s easier said than done, because I have moments and days where I feel shitty and cynical and depressed. But for the most part, these practices have given me a lot of happiness and a lot of trusting in my own art. It helps that I’m of the school that the world is not a bad place, and for the most part people are full of love and are also lovable.”

Cherry Glazerr plays the Rickshaw Theatre on Friday (March 8).