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Celebrating their 10th birthday, Canadian indie-pop act Stars are proving that their success hasn’t been a fluke. Currently based in Montreal, Stars—a four-man, one-woman act—recently released their fifth full-length album, The Five Ghosts, the band’s first release on its own label, Soft Revolution. After a summer-long tour testing and eventually promoting the new songs, Stars is getting ready for a tour-ending show in Montreal this Saturday.

Stars albums have frequently been marked with very emotional lyrics on love and death. Evan Cranley, the band’s bassist and guitarist, explains that while past albums have also dealt with these kinds of lyrical themes, their newest release is especially rooted in personal expression.

“I think that all five of us have been through a lot personally and spiritually over the last two years, three years in our lives,” Cranley says. “What the music sounds like and talks about is definitely personal experiences. The last two or three years have been the biggest kind of growth in a sense as people.”

Though past successes—2004’s Set Yourself on Fire and 2007’s In Our Bedroom After the War dealt with similar ideas, Cranley feels that there’s a stronger connection to the lyrical themes on The Five Ghosts.

“The older you get, you tend to reflect more and maybe relate more with your personal experiences,” he says. “I think we’ve just gotten deeper in touch with the subject matter we’ve always talked about.”

Similarly, the band’s sound can be tracked over time and the newest album demonstrates some key aural transitions in Stars. Cranley says that In Our Bedroom After the War was more of a “celebratory rock record,” while the band tried to use more synthesizers on the new record to achieve a somewhat darker feeling.

“It might seem like small differences to people who have listened to our catalogue, but I mean I always try to push something that hasn’t been pushed before,” Cranley says. “I think this time it was important that we push the synths a little bit more, and it was almost an intent to be a little colder.

Cranley feels that the band was able to push themselves to new areas of creativity by surrounding themselves with less familiar equipment.

“I think [unfamiliarity] really offsets the lyrical content as well with the synths,” he says. “So it was all very on purpose; we tend to be quite calculated in how we do things.”

With this being the first album released on Stars’ own label, Cranley says that a lot of their friends and peers have been impressed by the band’s initiative to launch themselves, but not much has changed in the way the band produces music.

“We just kind of curated this home for ourselves and hopefully it’s a place where we can keep putting out Stars records for a long time,” Cranley says. “Its purely a business decision and also kind of an aesthetic imprint as well. I think Stars records—they way they sound, the way they look, they way they’re performed live—will only happen on the imprint that we made.”

As former members of the Toronto supergroup Broken Social Scene, Stars are no strangers to working with their friends on projects and invited Apostle of Hustle’s frontman  Andrew Whiteman to work on what is his second Stars album.-

“Inviting Andrew Whiteman to play was really a no-brainer, because the five of us are tremendous fans of how he approaches the instrument,” Cranley says. “I just think he added little flavours here and there that really brought the songs to another level.”

“As far as musical community is concerned,” Cranley says, “I’m friends with a lot of musicians here and I find that community in music is really important because it helps to push one another creatively, and maybe business wise, because it’s nice to have a support system of people that are doing the same things that you do.”

Further considering the effects of personal lives on music, Cranley and singer/guitarist Amy Millan are expecting a baby and says the arrival will definitely change the way the band operates and the sound of their music.

“I think just your whole outlook on life will change, so it has to musically,” he says. “I don’t know how it will change yet. I suspect I’ll take things a lot more seriously …  or maybe I won’t, I don’t know. The roads are going to change, physically—there’ll have to be nannies and different ways of travelling, but you can’t stop doing what you love, and I think that’s important.”

“And artistically who knows,” he adds. “It will definitely influence what we do on the next record, which we’ll hopefully start doing early in the new year.”

For the last show of the tour, Cranley is very excited to be playing in Montreal.

“I’ve always used the city as a texture and an inspiring place to fuel me and I know other people in the band really like to write and create here, it’s a special place,” he says.

Cranley added that unlike previous shows showcasing the new album, he expects this Saturday’s performance to be a “real celebration of our catalogue and the last 10, 11 years of the band.”

“It’s my favourite place to play in the world,” he says. “I can’t wait.”  

Stars plays Metropolis Saturday, December 4. Tickets are $28.