Dan Bejar insists that Destroyer is a band; an honest-to-goodness, traditional, five dudes and dudettes sitting in a room jamming and making tunes. This is clearly up for debate though and, depending upon who you read, Destroyer is a Bejar vehicle with a rotating roster of musicians assisting in realizing his extra marital vision while having various dalliances away from the prying eyes of his New Pornographer life partners. However, for Destroyer’s past two albums, the glittering Destroyer’s Rubies and the exquisite new release, Trouble in Dreams, it has indeed been a band.

Surrounding himself with little known, but highly respected Canadian musicians inclding Ted Bois, Nicolas Bragg, Ted Loewen of The Battles and erstwhile New Pornographers contributor Fisher Rose, Bejar/Destroyer have created two records of sparse, intricate beauty, full of words and spacious arrangements. The stability of having a regular stable of bandmates (only the drummer changed between those two records) created an “utter and complete” difference from the recording of previous albums.

However, Dan Bejar is a contrarian, if nothing else. In the next breath, he is opining on the similarities between his earlier recordings (with the exception of 2004’s Your Blues) and Trouble in Dreams, asserting that having a band has been a consistent feature of Destroyer albums. And that is not the only contrary remark emerging from Bejar’s mouth during the interview. Destroyer have a reputation for lyrical complexity (a well earned one, no less, take this sample from ‘Rubies’ from Destroyer’s Rubies – “Shadowy figures babbling on about typical rural shit/I wave bye to them in a modern way and increase my stay at the dock of the bay”), yet upon being asked whether he was thinking about the next album, the response is a decidedly concise “Yes”.

Despite this brevity lyrics are at the heart of what Destroyer do, Bejar’s polarising voice a vessel to deliver some of the most intricate and obtuse words in rock today. But ask him why his lyrics are so complex, and he’ll tell you “I could care less about lyrical complexity. I don’t even know what that means. I want things to be as instantly striking and impressionable as possible at all times. Pure poetry. Always.” Suddenly his verbosity returned. Why then does everyone talk about your renowned self-referential lyrics? “People misunderstanding my work; journalists reading the work of other journalists and so on.”

Strangely Bejar and Destroyer have progressively become more accessible over their nearly decade long career, to the point where Trouble in Dreams, while stripped back and wordy, is essentially a subversive pop record. So, has this been a conscious development? “I have tired of using a shitload of chords and words. I feel there’s better ways of getting at things.” Longtime fans of Destroyer, and Bejar’s work with the New Pornographers, may dispute the claim that Trouble in Dreams contains fewer words. But certainly musically, the complexity is fading, leaving sparsely instrumented arrangements, allowing Bejar’s nasal stream of consciousness to come to the fore.

If there is one point where he remains consistent it is in recognizing the importance of poetry in his music. Of course, when asked about the themes running through the new album, he adds it almost as an afterthought. “There are many themes running through it. Nostalgia; the beach; fascism; poets and poetry.”  And while literary references, lines from previous albums and tangential digressions about who knows what abound, they are delivered in such a manner as to bewitch the listener nonetheless.

While he “hasn’t written a single song” for any new album, rest assured that when he does (probably after finishing the follow up to the New Pornographers’ Challengers from last year), it will be brutally wordy, obscure and difficult. And probably wonderful.