Wake Island are one of those bands for whom assigning genre categories are a pointless exercise…. Prog-pop? Synth-rock? Let’s just call it inventive, melodic music for guitars, keyboards, drums and vocals. Based in Montréal, with band members’ roots in Lebanon, Canada and the US, the quartet recently released their second album, It Takes Time to be Uncomfortable (on vinyl, CD and download), which was recorded at Breakglass Studios by Jace Lasek of Besnard Lakes fame. Dorice Tepley interviewed guitarist Nadim Maghzal in advance of their Wavelength debut tomorrow night at Soybomb HQ.

You've been together for a while now but used to be called Intensive Care, why the name change? Were you going in a new direction and wanted a new name to reflect the new sound? Or were you just bored with it?

We changed our name for several reasons. First, we got tired of what Intensive Care reminded us of — it relates to a rather dark incident that happened at the early beginnings of the band. We felt that we had moved on with our lives since and wanted to freshen up the connotations of our name. Second, we changed drummers a few months before the name change. We felt like the entire sound of the band changed significantly around the time that Evan (our current drummer) joined the band in 2011. We felt like we were essentially starting a new band and we wanted a new name that reflected this. Third, it was really hard to find our old band on the Internet – when you type “Intensive Care” into a Google search, you get all sorts of hospital hits and other bands called Intensive Care in Europe and the US.

Wake Island is an actual place, a coral atoll located near Honolulu, and there's a 1941 film by the same name... any correlation between those and your name?

Yes, there is a correlation. The band name refers to the actual island. I was looking at the globe last summer, around the time we were searching for a new band name, and found a tiny little piece of land — Wake Island — in the middle the Pacific Ocean that sits almost perfectly halfway between North America and Asia. We felt like it was a cool name because it reflected our cultural origins with half the band born and raised in Lebanon and the other half in North America. Then we did further research and found out that Wake Island (the actual place) has its own time zone and is in fact “in the future” compared to most places on earth. We were sold.

You just released your fantastic second album, which was produced by Jace Lasek (known for working with Wolf Parade and Suuns). Is there a comfort level being able to work with a producer that you've had a long standing relationship with? At this point is he almost a fifth member of the band?

It is always a pleasure to work with Jace. He is an extremely talented musician, sound engineer and producer. He’s got his own way of doing things and we really love working with him in the studio. In terms of comfort though, I’d say that the relationship between us and Jace has evolved from being really challenging in the early days to more and more comfortable as we learned to work with him. We used to be very frantic in the studio; we had really big ideas and would freak out trying to achieve them all in a day of recording. Jace is a very level-headed guy on the other hand, so by dealing with him in the studio, we learned to trim the fat and make the whole process easier. The most recent studio sessions went by so smoothly and effortlessly compared to recording our first album back in 2009. That being said, this is not the “comfort” that our album name refers to.

It took you three years to release your second album. Were you facing challenges or simply taking that time to play around with different styles and techniques?

It's a mix of both. We were juggling many things in our lives, including finishing a Ph.D. in science, finishing music school and working in film. It was an exciting time, but it also meant we had to approach music a bit differently, trying to find time for it in the evenings. We started writing this album early in 2010 and were experimenting with new songwriting methods, to avoid repeating ourselves. That took some time and by the end of the year, we had half the record written and recorded. The songwriting took another turn when Jon, our old drummer, left the band and we quickly wrote a bunch of new songs with Evan when he replaced him. Our songwriting skills were honed, so all we needed was inspiration and it came like a storm. The rest of the stories involve many personal and professional delays that are way too boring for this interview.

How have you found it trying to expand your audience outside of Montreal? Have you been able to tour outside of Québec much? And what about the US? There's something about Montreal bands faring well down south.

Touring is really where it’s at for a musician, I find.  It’s the most fun and the most rewarding personal experiences.

We definitely do a lot of shows outside Québec and have visited most of the North American east coast cities many times over, where we try to build nice little followings. Toronto's definitely the trickiest of the bunch: It's a city we always struggle to understand, but we are getting the hang of it. It used to be intimidating, but we find ourselves loving it more every time we visit.

Also, we tour the US a lot. We absolutely love it there, it’s so much faster to get from one town to the next. We usually cover the upper east coast (NYC, Boston, Washington DC, Vermont etc.) and head to the midwest (Ohio, Indiana) all the way to Chicago, then back to Canada via the Detroit/Windsor border. We meet wonderful people along the way, and try to go back as often as we can to develop those friendships.

This summer is very exciting as we are embarking on two awesome tours — one in Europe and the other in Lebanon, where two of us come from. It's going to be an absolute blast!