Vancouver’s Mother Mother aren’t The Osmonds or The Partridge Family. Although brother and sister Ryan and Molly Guldemond form two-thirds of the band’s seamlessly intertwined vocal front, this skill wasn’t cultivated in the Guldemond Family Band, or even around the campfires of their youth.

“We didn’t really have any musical history as collaborators before this band,” Ryan Guldemond says. “It was a total shock. I almost forced Molly to do it—she wasn’t really a performing artist. She’s an artist, but she’s a graphic designer. If you’d told her four years ago she’d be in a serious touring band, she’d have laughed in your face, for sure.”

Mother Mother was formed in 2005 as an acoustic trio with the sibs and vocalist Debra-Jean Creelman as a vehicle for Ryan to break from his jazz background and explore his newfound fascination with songwriting. With the addition of a rhythm section and the help of producer Howard Redekopp (New Pornographers, Tegan & Sara), Mother Mother issued Touch Up on Last Gang Records in 2007. Once critics got all their superficial comparisons to The Pixies out of their system—undeniably, the Guldemonds and Creelman evoke the distinctive vocal alchemy between Black Francis and Kim Deal—the album’s pure pop melodicism, parsimonious musical inventiveness and off-kilter lyrical outlook garnered plenty of positive ink.

Now, on the eve of a quick summer tour across the prairies, the band awaits the arrival of their latest album, O My Heart, from the pressing plant so they can commence a fresh round of winning over fans. Helmed once again by Redekopp, the new album reflects Mother Mother’s growing maturity which, to Guldemond, seems to mean “less happy.”

“It’s a little darker—it’s a lot darker actually, a lot more thick in sound, more instrumentation and a bigger production altogether,” he says. “The lyrics are probably a little darker—yeah, I guess it’s moved on from the more cute, cheeky aesthetic [of Touch Up]. I suppose there was a dark undertone to some of those lyrics, but delivered in a more ebullient way. Being our first album, it’s impossible not to move on from that and try to shape that into the next effort. At the same time, unexpected things come out. The unforeseen.”

The band’s current preoccupation is with reproducing the more sophisticated sound of the new songs in a new setting. All the same, they’re taking care to preserve the sound people seemed to like in the first place. “There’s a lot of added instrumentation in the recording that we wanted to pay some homage to that in our show,” Guldemond says. “You get attached to certain nuances and to not have them there is a drag. Our bass player Jeremy [Page] is playing horns, Molly will play some synth and Ali [Siadat] is playing some sampler along with the drums. It’s not over the top; it’s very respectful to the music and subtly layered in. We wanted to make any addition subtle and make sure it really added to the core sound—nothing for its own sake.”

Following their present tour, which will bring them to The Pawn Shop on Canada Day, Mother Mother will take the rest of the summer off to gird for a big fall tour that will hopefully take in some places they’ve never toured before. Guldemond admits working in close quarters with a family member over sustained periods has its advantages and disadvantages.

“There’s something very convenient but also very treacherous about working with your family,” he says, “and that is how easy it is to take for granted their forgiveness of your follies and vice versa. That being said, it’s nice to have that immediate forgiveness; you can just kind of move on, you’ve been there a million times before. But at the same time, there’s something that happens with your friends or working partners who aren’t in your family, in that you do have to exercise more tact when conflicts arise, because there’s nothing outside that working relationship that you’re indefinitely tied to. It can end and it can be over, whereas your sibling is there whether you’re together or not.”