For someone who comes across as a too-cool-for-your-school badass on-stage, Alexis Krauss is pretty wonderful in conversation. You want nice? That would be the Sleigh Bells singer, who, when reached on her cellphone in New York City, seems on a mission to usurp the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne as the most charming interview subject in rock ’n’ roll.

Along with her bandmate Derek E. Miller, Krauss is enjoying a week off in the Big Apple, which she calls home. That’s a nice change, as Sleigh Bells has been busy since the release of its bold and bombastic sophomore album, Reign of Terror, on which the duo makes a seemingly effortless transition from Brooklyn-based buzz-band to mainstream pick-to-click. This year’s major career-boosters have included landing the cover of the newly revamped Spin magazine, scoring the musical guest spot in late February on Saturday Night Live, and getting greenlighted for the upcoming Pitchfork Musical Festival. It’s not just the music world that’s embraced Krauss and Miller; given that the two have what Pavement would describe as miles of style, it’s no shocker you can see them in a GQ fashion spread this spring.

Sleigh Bells is a band on the rise, this being doubly admirable considering that Reign of Terror isn’t exactly calibrated for mass consumption. But if all the above has gone to Krauss’s head, she’s doing a great job of sounding refreshingly down to earth.

“You’re going to be jealous of me,” the outgoing singer teases from the streets of NYC, breaking into a delighted-sounding laugh. “We’ve got a couple of days off between tours, and it’s 75 degrees here and sunny—so beautiful.”

The way that’s she’s utilizing her downtime gives you a pretty good idea that the raven-haired Ray-Ban fan isn’t out to become the reigning queen of the Williamsburg hipster scene.

“I have an 11-month-old puppy, so I’m spending time with her,” Krauss reveals. “I’m kind of a homebody. When I get home, I just sort of den up and watch lots of TV and read. I hang out with my dog and eat good food that I can’t normally get when I’m driving around the country. My excitement comes from touring. When I’m home, it’s all about resting and relaxing.”

What comes across most during Krauss’s interview with the Georgia Straight is that she couldn’t be happier with how her life is unfolding. How odd, then, given how great a place Reign of Terror has her in today, that Sleigh Bells’ latest was born out of a time of epic sadness.

We’ll get to the horrible-darkness part of the story in a bit. First, some background. Arguably even more so than Krauss, Miller, the band’s guitarist and chief architect, rolled the dice big-time on Sleigh Bells. By the time he was in his late teens, Miller was making a living playing guitar in progressive hardcore unit Poison the Well. Frustrated by aiming for the affection of the Warped Tour crowd, he set out to do something different. After working with future members of Surfer Blood in his hometown of Jupiter, Florida, Miller headed to California, starting a two-guitars-and-drummer combo. When that went nowhere, he spent time licking his wounds back in Florida, and then headed to NYC, where, while waiting tables, he’d eventually meet Krauss, who was having dinner with her mother. At the time, she was not only making good money teaching Spanish, but was also in the running for a Rhodes Scholarship. Miller had a career that had gone nowhere since his leaving Poison the Well.

Krauss, then, had something to fall back on if being in a band didn’t work out. Miller had nothing but music, and his passion for Sleigh Bells eventually convinced the New Jersey-born singer to trade in academic life for a microphone.

“Derek was incredibly ambitious right from the start, and had really high expectations for Sleigh Bells,” Krauss recalls. “When Derek and I met, I was teaching and in the throes of this career that was incredibly demanding and really required all of my time and attention. But the more I worked with him, the more I realized that the project had real potential. I remember very clearly a time—like January or February of 2009—where I was having to make some really tough decisions, whether I was going to continue teaching and take a scholarship. He sat me down and was like ‘Please. Just trust me. Give me a year.’

“So I went for it, and we were very fortunate that we didn’t have to spend a long time struggling,” she continues. “We got a lot of shows, went out on the road, and then had a lot of really lucky things happen to us, incredible accidents to go along with our hard work and discipline.”

Miller chose wisely when he decided he wanted Krauss to be the face of his project. The singer, who’s typically front and centre in Sleigh Bells’ photos and videos, proved a natural performer. She might have been teaching, but there’s an argument to be made that entertainment runs deep in her blood.

Her father was a fixture on the Asbury Park music scene as a member of the band Cats on a Smooth Surface, a regular attraction at the fabled Stone Pony nightclub. Krauss officially entered showbiz as a kid in 1997, appearing in an ad for Nickelodeon Magazine that you can find on YouTube. At age 10, she was singing on-stage, in film, and on television, and by 12 working with the likes of the Berman Brothers, the Grammy Award–winning siblings responsible for producing the Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?” In her early teens Krauss held down bass and vocal duties in a prefab pop group called RubyBlue, the multicultural band presumably designed as a supposedly organic, pre-Avril alternative to Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. Realizing her heart wasn’t in it, she walked away, doing vocal work on demos that were shopped to major-label acts and singing at weddings on weekends.

That unglamorous, behind-the-scenes work would in many ways prepare her for the early days of Sleigh Bells, when the band was unquestionably Miller’s show.

“When we started, I felt like a session singer, because that’s what I’d done for many years,” Krauss admits. “I was comfortable with the idea of stepping in to work with a stranger, learning someone else’s songs. I felt like I was plugging into his music. But the more we worked together, it was obvious that there was a chemistry and an interest in expanding our horizons, pushing ourselves to see how far we could take the project.”

Sleigh Bells’ rise was a rapid one, due partly to the undisputed photogeneity of its two members and largely to the group having a pretty great battle plan (sent-from-the-heavens vocals set to the salvos of a one-man stun-gun guitar army). The group was barely out of the rehearsal space when it was landing full-page spreads in publications like Spin, this in turn leading professional shit-disturber M.I.A. to sign Sleigh Bells to her N.E.E.T. recording label.

The combination of Krauss’s pillow-soft vocals and Miller’s overamped distortion tsunamis would help turn the band’s debut, Treats, into a blogosphere-blessed hit. But, in a cruel twist of fate, the subsequent ascension of Sleigh Bells to indie-heavyweight status coincided with the worst period in the life of the man who put the band together.

In 2009, Miller’s father died in a motorcycle accident. His mother was subsequently diagnosed with cancer, the good news there being that, following treatment, it’s now in remission. So, at a time when the guitarist was watching Sleigh Bells take off in ways he’d only dared dream, there was a coal-black cloud hanging over his head.

“His pain was very obvious to me,” Krauss says. “When you’re touring you spend every waking moment with each other. Especially in the beginning, it was just Derek and I and our manager, who was tour managing for us. He was processing all this personal tragedy at the same time that we were starting to play bigger shows and our record was starting to sell. So it was these superhigh highs, and these incredibly low lows.”

Things got so bleak that, after playing Bonnaroo in 2011, Sleigh Bells cancelled a high-profile slot for Lollapalooza, the two bandmates realizing that it was finally time to stop and step back. In a tip-off to where the new album’s name comes from, Miller was feeling, quite literally, like a man in the grip of a reign of terror, his family under extended siege.

“I could see the struggle,” Krauss reveals. “We talked about it—it was my goal that he knew every step of the way that his health and the health of his family was the priority here. If at any point he wanted to stop or just go home and disappear, I wanted to be there for him 100 percent. And I was very concerned for him at points. I could see that he was turning inward. But I could also see that he was channelling a lot of his pain into the new record. That’s why he’ll say, unironically, that writing and recording this record saved his life. That was his catharsis, his way of communicating all of the things that he had pent up over the months.”

One has to listen closely to pick up Miller’s inner turmoil on Reign of Terror. The album’s dark side is in many ways obscured by the magnificently blinding sonic sheen. As Sleigh Bells has been telling everyone who will listen, the record was heavily—massively, in fact—coloured by a love of ’80s pop-metal, specifically the hard-candy, made-for-hockey-rinks stuff served up by Def Leppard and legendary producer Robert “Mutt” Lange.

There’s no danger of anyone missing those influences on Reign of Terror, the album starting off with “True Shred Guitar”, a song that couldn’t do a better job of living up to its name. As Miller unleashes a bunker-busting barrage of six-string that sounds like the Sunset Strip during the Jack Daniel’s-and-Miss-Clairol glory years, Krauss shouts out “Here we go!” and “I wanna see those fucking hands in the air!” In the background, a revved-up stadium audience roars its pre-recorded approval.

That’s a warning for what lies ahead. With Sleigh Bells’ drum machine thumping away like it learned everything it knows from Big Black, Miller and Krauss fuse megaton riffage with Satan’s cheerleaders’ vocals in “Crush”. Elsewhere, “Demons” marries a hot-shrapnel air strike with a concussion-causing back end, while “Born to Lose” makes you remember exactly why you loved Guitar Hero back in the ’00s. In between the sonic punishment there are moments of genuine beauty, including the gauzy, broken-crystal antipop of “Road to Hell” and the soft-focus-’80s near-ballad “End of the Line”.

Beneath the shock-and-awe, metal-glazed pyrotechnics, there beats a heart on Reign of Terror, with Miller seemingly working through his dark days with lines like “You’re going away but you’re coming back some day” (“Comeback Kid”) and “Don’t leave me now, don’t leave me now” (“End of the Line”).

Krauss points to “Comeback Kid” as proof that Miller, the band’s main lyricist, ended up in a better place over Reign of Terror’s creation. “That was the last song that we did,” she says. “It sets a different tone than a lot of Reign of Terror. It’s much more optimistic, a much more joyful track. I think that very much signalled a new direction and a clear conscience.”

Sleigh Bells’ greatest trick on the record is the way that it manages to sound both dangerously serrated and deliciously ethereal, with Krauss deserving a good deal of credit for that. She notes that her relationship with Miller has evolved to where she no longer feels like a hired gun, her input on the songwriting front both welcomed and encouraged.

“When we sat down for Reign of Terror I made it clear that I wanted more input,” she says. “And that happened—we were much more collaborative, which was great for me. Obviously I feel more invested, and a more integral part of the music that we make. We bring a lot of different things to the table, so we think about things differently. Take ‘Comeback Kid’—that’s my melody. It’s very much a singer’s melody—it’s kind of got an R & B thing. But it’s also got a juxtaposition. We’re fascinated by mixing things so you’ve got something sweet but also with teeth.”

That combination, Krauss acknowledges, isn’t for everyone. Do something outside of the box and you’re going to attract detractors, something that Sleigh Bells has grown used to. The band did a bang-up job of polarizing North America with its Saturday Night Live appearance, a good chunk of the audience obviously confused by Miller and Krauss (joined by touring guitarist Jason Boyer) standing in front of a massive wall of Marshalls and nothing else.

“We are a really polarizing band,” she acknowledges. “There are people who understand us and feel very comfortable with our music and excited by it, and then there are a lot of people who are put off by it, and think it’s cacophonous and jarring. But I’d rather be polarizing than just wash over people pleasantly. Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips wrote something about us where he was like ‘It’s the most obvious combination—you take poppy vocals with heavy guitars and bombastic beats and them combine them into something that seems very natural.’”

There’s really only one word for an endorsement like that, especially when you consider where it’s coming from and who it’s directed at: nice.

Sleigh Bells plays the Commodore on Monday (April 9) as part of the Straight Series.