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It’s a bright and spring-chilled Tuesday afternoon in Toronto, and Timber Timbre are getting ready to spend the next few hours in a dark basement. This week, the trio are using the Underground of the Drake Hotel as a rehearsal space for their upcoming tour, and without fail, a joke about its suitability to the band—dark, hidden away—is made on the way down the stairs.

So much has been made about the band’s spooky sounds and aesthetic over the past few years that it’s hard not to reference it. Part deliberate cover-up, part artistic choice, the band knows it and they don’t do much to deflect it, but on their stellar new album, Creep On Creepin’ On, there’s a bit of a humourous nod to that perception—and you need look no further than the title (and the almost upbeat title track) for it.

“I’ve been asked to talk about the dark, kind of spooky nature of the music a lot throughout the last couple years. [The title] was meant to be a bit self-ironic and kind of point to the lighter side and sort of the humour in what we’re doing,” band figurehead Taylor Kirk admits.

No doubt the haunting, soulful folk/blues sound that Kirk has been producing since his independent solo debut Cedar Shakes in 2006 evokes something uneasy, almost sinister, but listen closely enough and the dramatics of it are evident. It’s essential not only to the music, but to Kirk personally.

“I guess it’s just always been a bit of a disguise for me. Disguising really personal stories in my songwriting. And also as a performer I just find it helps [the] kind of anxiety and vulnerability as a performer. I don’t feel really supernatural to be performing. It’s a way to compensate for that.”

For 2009’s self-titled breakthrough—released independently by Out of this Spark and eventually picked up and re-released by Arts & Crafts—Kirk experimented by bringing other musicians on board, eventually settling into the line-up of multi-instrumentalist Simon Trottier and violinist Mika Posen as a solidified trio. The three of them, now two albums and a lot of touring deep into being a band, approach songwriting the same way—Kirk completing songs and the band filling in the spaces in the studio—but this time, the live show is a focus. Until now, the band didn’t make a habit of practice.

Now, with less room for on-stage improvisation, and tasked with in-studio completion of songs that Taylor has already essentially completed, it would seem that Trottier and Posen are in a position of great pressure, but they feel otherwise.

“I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself. I don’t feel too much [external] pressure,” Trottier explains. “Sometimes I think I know what I’m doing is kind of good, but sometimes it’s not really what Taylor is expecting, so it can be hard to adjust myself. But usually I think I can get the right thing.”

Posen, however, sums up the process much more bluntly. “When you do what we do, playing in other peoples’ bands, that’s just what you do. You adapt.”

With the trio set to embark on another lengthy tour and their profile rising rapidly still, one wonders if they—Kirk especially—will ever get to the point where they’re comfortable enough to blur the lines between performer and person, lifting the veil of darkness that’s been draped over them. Kirk is certain this will never be the case. And when asked what would happen if it did, he laughs, his quiet wit spot-on. “We’ll become a rock band.”

Read more about Timber Timbre on the X3 Artist of the Month microsite.