Matt Didemus, foreground, and Jeremy Greenspan make up the Canadian electro-pop group Junior Boys. Their new album is entitled Begone Dull Care. (Joe Dilworth/Canadian Press)

Like any other genre, electronic music has its own pantheon of heroes, pioneers and all-round inspirational figures. Some of today’s practitioners claim Derrick May, Juan Atkins and other prime movers behind Detroit’s ’80s techno scene as their forerunners. For others, it’s Kraftwerk, the Teutonic men-machines who introduced innumerable listeners to the crystalline textures of the synthesizer in the ’70s. Those of a different stripe might cite the sonic explorations of Delia Darbyshire and her fellow wizards in the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the ’60s.

'I can’t go to a dance club without hearing music that literally sounds like Mötley Crüe to me — it’s just so over-the-top.'

—Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys

It’s telling that Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus – the two men behind the Canadian duo Junior Boys – pay tribute to someone completely outside this predictable grouping. The group’s newest album, Begone Dull Care, is named after a 1949 short produced at the National Film Board of Canada. It’s an exuberant work by legendary Scottish-Canadian animator Norman McLaren, a dance in abstract animated form that is ingeniously choreographed to a rollicking performance by the late Oscar Peterson.

McLaren and co-director Evelyn Lambart animated Begone Dull Care chiefly by painting and scratching directly onto the film stock. As Greenspan explains in a recent interview, McLaren’s playfulness and openness in regard to the means of producing his art inspired a similar self-awareness in the music of Junior Boys.

“The media is referenced in all of [McLaren’s] work,” says Greenspan, speaking from the UK office of the band’s label, Domino. “And he shows in his work a joy of creation, a joy of doing it. That’s what really struck me and what I really liked. I felt a kinship toward him based on what I perceived as a similar challenge to what he was trying to address in his work. I wanted to make an album that was kind of conscious of itself.”

Formed in 1999 by Greenspan and fellow Hamilton, Ont. musician Johnny Dark — who was later replaced by producer and engineer Matt Didemus — Junior Boys first gained notice with the 2003 release of the Birthday/Last Exit EP. Insistently melodic yet slightly off-kilter, Junior Boys’ electro-pop pulsed with restless energy, the songs given additional texture by Greenspan’s breathy, often emotionally fraught vocal style. Greenspan and Didemus would refine the formula on the albums Last Exit (2004) and So This Is Goodbye (2006), perfecting a starkly intimate sound that seemed equally appropriate in a lonely bedroom and a humid dance club.

A decade into his musical career — he considers it a “funny notion” to even have such a thing — Greenspan found himself wondering how to follow McLaren’s lead and keep from obsessing over the limitless possibilities of digital-age music making.

“We wanted to make electronic music which, unlike a lot of other electronic music nowadays, had a sort of rawness to it,” he says. “We didn’t want to get bogged down with trying to sound overly polished.”

(Domino Records)

Greenspan found further inspiration in dance music styles of an earlier age. “I listened to a lot of disco,” he says, “both early disco and late disco. The early disco has that really organic quality and the later stuff of course becomes much more synthetic. A lot of what I love about it, especially the underground stuff, is it has an almost garage-y quality – these guys couldn’t afford much. In disco’s middle period, everybody had these incredible recording budgets, and sometimes a lot of the music suffered for it.

“The underground stuff was more about guys starting these labels in the back of vans, and the result has this unedited naïveté which I really, really like. A lot of people making modern electronic music feel this inclination to make sure the vocals are super-affected or to make sure everything sounds super-clean. That’s not what it’s about for me.”

New Junior Boys tracks like Bits & Pieces and the languidly funky single Hazel reflect that desire for a looser, less pristine aesthetic that prizes the raw over the cooked. “That’s the problem with music made exclusively on computers,” says Greenspan. “I find a lot of the time there’s too many options available for you. What’s more, they’re just options made by some programmer. It’s the same as if you had a million-dollar studio and the London Philharmonic at your disposal and the budget to make any decision. Then where’s the challenge?”

As Greenspan notes, limitations can become beneficial. “That’s why we tend to use a lot of equipment outside of our computers, because they have their own idiosyncratic nature and because that sort of limits us to whatever we’re using at the time. You have to come up with a sound instead of just going to your computer and saying, ‘OK, I’ll use this piano sound here and this flugelhorn sound here.’ If you actually have to go and record those things, you’re thinking about them much more. You start really considering how they sound and being a little bit more thoughtful about the choices that you make.”

All this may explain why Begone Dull Care is the group’s warmest recording to date, the agitated and even desolate nature of its predecessors having given way to a less insular mood. Though earlier favourites like In the Morning boasted a more instantaneous sort of appeal, the new tracks open up in surprising ways.

“I felt as though what was being celebrated in music these days is a type of immediacy,” Greenspan says. “People crave the songs that are the loudest and most immediate, the things that they can review and understand within two seconds of hearing it. I can’t go to a dance club without hearing music that literally sounds like Mötley Crüe to me — it’s just so over-the-top. It’s the same problem in indie rock: how many string sections and flugelhorns and lute players can you fit into one song? I wanted to buck against that trend as much as possible.”

The slow burn of The Animator and Dull to Pause, which blossoms into pedal-steel-guitar glory only in the final moments, illustrates the success of this strategy. “The album presents certain challenges,” Greenspan acknowledges.

“The songs can be long and certain melodies and musical ideas reveal themselves very slowly. But I wanted to go with that and make sure the album wasn’t as disposable as I find a lot of new music.”

Begone Dull Care is in stores March 31. Junior Boys play Winnipeg on Apr. 4, Saskatoon on Apr. 6, Edmonton on Apr. 7, Calgary on Apr. 9, Vancouver on Apr. 11, Montreal on May 9 and Ottawa on May 10.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.