“I think we’ve painted a target
on our chests. If the record
flops, well, we almost didn’t
make it anyway. Wolf Parade
dangles by a thread a lot of
the time.” SPENCER KRUG

doodles on a pad at his kitchen table, even less at ease deconstructing his modest success than he is cultivating it. “Basically what I’m saying is, whereas bands in the past may have been like, ‘ We can make it, we can take it all the way,’ maybe there are some Canadian indie bands in my generation who found themselves popular and never even asked themselves if that’s what they wanted.”

Following buzz generated from a pair of self-titled EPs, the debut album Apologies to the Queen Mary, produced by Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, was greeted in 2005 by much fawning, including a gaudy 9. 2 from Pitchfork. Wolf Parade—Krug, singer/guitarist Dan Boeckner, 30, and drummer Arlen Thompson, 29, were all raised in British Columbia, while electronic-doohickey diddler Hadji Bakara, 28, was raised in Michigan—had already migrated east to find themselves at the center of a music scene in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood that included their friends Arcade Fire, Stars, and Islands, all with free-floating, symbiotically intersecting memberships. (A semiofficial fifth member, ex–Hot Hot Heat guitarist Dante DeCaro, still lives in B.C.)

Three years and no fewer than seven ancillary Wolf Parade–related albums later, the “next Seattle!” hubbub has quieted, but Apologies remains endearingly galvanizing despite, or because of, unexpectedly ebullient choruses like “Nobody knows you / And nobody gives a damn.” (“Kids joyously sing along to these depressing things with huge shit-eating grins,” Bakara acknowledges later.)

Krug places the needle down on a warped copy of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, by fellow Canuck Neil Young, and boils water for coffee. His apartment clearly belongs to a creator of music rather than a connoisseur of it: The record collection in the living room consists of a dozen or so LPs and half a shelf of CDs. Meanwhile, a giant marimba takes up the entire foyer, and the room where he spends most of his time is cluttered with drums, keyboards, wires, and consoles, and is in the midst of being soundproofed. (“I was told when I moved in a couple months ago that the neighbor downstairs is deaf,” he says. “She is not.”) The majority of the songs written here find their way onto records by Sunset Rubdown—Krug’s pre–Wolf Parade, still-thriving nom du rock—Swan Lake, Fifths of Seven, or Frog Eyes. That he refuses to categorize these as side projects simply because the albums sell fewer than 120,000 copies is a source of confusion even to his own fans.

“People are suspicious about how much time and energy and love is being put in if you’re able to crank stuff out like so many cookies from a cookie cutter,” he says. “I hear all the time that I should quit one band and focus on the other, but what am I supposed to say to that?”

In Wolf Parade, Boeckner and Krug split frontman duties and bring contrasting approaches to their songs—the lanky, tatted Boeckner, who looks like he should have a pack of smokes rolled under his T-shirt sleeve at all times and is one blue knit cap away from being Jimbo from The Simpsons, is generally tagged as the rock guy, while Krug is the arty, inscrutable one—which leads fans and critics alike to pit one’s songs against the other’s, much to the band’s dismay. And since nothing engenders failure in the indie landscape like success, Wolf Parade know that by not only daring to release a follow-up at all, but one that plays up their intricate interplay and expansive arrangements with fewer immediate hooks, they’re gonna get a little guff.

“I think we’ve painted a target on our chests,” says Krug of the just-released At Mount Zoomer. “If the record is received well, we’ve dealt with that world and we’ll handle it better this time. If it flops, then, well, we almost didn’t make the record anyway. Wolf Parade kind of dangles by a thread a lot of the time.”

TO HEAR THEM TELL I T, the very things that make Wolf Parade’s existence so precarious are what allowed it to thrive. Their first gig in 2003 was opening for Arcade Fire, just two weeks after Krug and Boeckner started playing together.

“I joined the day before the show,” recalls Thompson. “We didn’t even have any equipment. So the luxury of time isn’t something we’ve ever had.”

So now that the band members may appear to be too busy to give Wolf Parade their all—in addition to Krug’s many outlets, Handsome Furs, Boeckner’s collaboration with his wife, Alexei Perry, will record their follow-up to last year’s Plague Park with Thompson before this summer’s Wolf Parade tour, while Bakara’s DJ duo Megasoid is starting to garner attention—this hecticness serves to give the band more focus.