Take apart a Wolf Parade album, and you’ll marvel at the strange way all the pieces fit together. Spencer Krug tends towards boiling synths and a surrealist turn of phrase, while his fellow songwriter Dan Boeckner prefers simple, opaque lyrics and a guitar sound like he’s torn a speaker. Dan knows how to hit big choruses, where Spencer prefers squalls of noise and drawn-out tension. Separately, they work well; together, there’s a strange alchemy at play that bridges those weird gaps and lifts their work to a rare height.

Part of their success relies on a very un-rock level of democracy, with each album loosely alternating between Krug and Boeckner songwriting: though they play together on every song, there’s a distinct sense of rotating leadership that keeps intra-band tensions at a minimum. In any other case, such balance might be tokenistic, or unsettle the course of an album, but Dan and Spencer both work with such remarkable consistency that there’s no room for mediocrity on either side.

Spencer kicks off Expo 86 with the high-tension Cloud Shadow on the Window. Arlen Thompson ’s drums are insistent in the sparse verse, where Spencer recounts a dream of being a web, “a dreamcatcher hanging from the window of a minivan parked along the water’s edge”. More a singing novelist than a traditional songwriter, Spencer follows that burst of writerly detail with the fantastic “I’d say that I was all alone”, the beginning delivered with a shrug that belies the phrase’s menacing ambiguity. The quiet pull of negative space, accented by a slowly bending guitar chord or a wavy synth sweep, is as important to the song’s abstract story as the bizarre lyrics. Cloud Shadow, like the best of Spencer’s songs, borders on the alien, but remains powerful and emotive even in its strangeness.

Dan Boeckner’s songwriting is generally the more traditional of the two, but ‘traditional’ only in the context of Wolf Parade. Palm Road is roof-shaking indie rock, building each verse to a peak, accumulating force until the title lyric is a rallying cry. Little Golden Age earns its expansive chorus, nailing that moment of singing-in-your-bedroom transcendence as the lyrics describe just that – it’s a neat little rock synecdoche if ever there was one.

Expo 86 gets a little flabby in the mid-section: Pobody’s Nerfect and Two Men In New Tuxedos sound good, but don’t quite achieve the status of the rest of the album. Wolf Parade have, though, saved some fire for the end in the form of the six-plus-minutes epic of Cave-O-Sapien. Unlike most songs of such length, Cave-O-Sapien might be Wolf Parade’s most hook-heavy to date. It’s also probably Spencer’s most conventional song, with an indie-pop feel so well-built and invigorating it begs for a cover by fellow Canadians the New Pornographers. Its concise melody and bright lead guitar shimmer with excess energy, with Spencer sounding damn-near positive as he yelps “I’ve got you/til you’re gone” – trust him to skew it a little to the left.