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It turns out that great albums can happen while you’re busy making other plans. Halifax’s Wintersleep wrote the bulk of their latest album, New Inheritors, while on tour. In addition to getting ready for their show each night, the band spent part of their soundcheck ironing out new songs. As you might expect, finding the time to do so is no easy task.

“It depends on the tour, it depends on how much time you have on stage to [sound]check before the show,” says bassist Mike Bigelow. “Once it’s time for the show, it’s got to be all songs that people already know, or [the songs] have got to be finished.”

Perhaps the band is able to produce new material this way because each member contributes as a songwriter.

 “It’s the first Wintersleep record with this lineup,” says Bigelow. “Everyone in the band also plays guitar and writes, maybe not even full songs, but [is] always writing music and working on stuff at home.”

This type of songwriting shows on the album. New Inheritors has a lot of variety. Just compare the first two singles: “Black Camera,” a minor key straight-ahead rock song, and “New Inheritors,” a slower vocal-driven song with folk undertones. Sometimes the polarity can be seen in a single song, like “Experience The Jewel,” a quiet, jazzy opening-track-turned-epic-overture.

Several songs have a darker feel than Wintersleep’s earlier work. However, Bigelow claims that wasn’t the band’s intent.

“I’m not denying it, but I also don’t think we went in with a conscious effort to make a dark rock album,” he says.

In terms of the content, Bigelow says that on songs like “Black Camera,” it’s up to the listener to come up with their own meaning.

“When it comes to Paul’s lyrics he doesn’t talk about them too much and we don’t really ask,” he jokes. “Paul’s a very interesting writer in a lot of ways and we all respect and admire his lyricism for sure.”

Wintersleep are currently working their way across Canada and the northern United States with the Besnard Lakes. When playing live, the band carefully plans their set list to balance heavier rock songs with their quieter pop tracks.

“Lately we’ve been trying to play these two or three songs in a row that are all in the same tuning, and we can bang them out pretty quickly,” Bigelow says. “It’s fun to start the show out with two or three bangin’ rockers and then you can kind of take it in a different direction.”

Live, the band have also been trying to recreate some of the trickier sounds on the album, like the multiple layers at the end of “Baltic.” However, Bigelow says that their use of things like samplers is kept to a minimum on stage.

 After releasing their third album, Welcome to the Night Sky, the band won the 2008 Juno Award for New Group of the Year, but they haven’t let the award go to their heads.

“We’ve always worked really hard and toured a lot, if there is outside expectation we don’t really feel it because we’re on tour,” Bigelow says. “Wintersleep’s never been a band that had this big record and that was it, not ‘it’ of their career, but [that] just kind of skyrockets them. [For us] it’s always been a constant progression, which I think we prefer. I think that’s a better route.”

Wintersleep is playing Cabaret Mile End with the Besnard Lakes and Rah Rah on October 30.