After more than a decade together, Wine Lips know their sound well enough to mess with it. On TV Dinner, they wanted to keep the high-energy sound familiar while still finding ways to push it somewhere new.

“I’m not trying to repeat songs. We tried to find a balance of keeping the high-energy punk sound, like what we’re kind of known for, but also changing it from the last record to make it slightly different,” Hilborn explains.

Part of that change comes from Evans, who provides lead vocals on several tracks, including single “Projector,” which she describes as “a lot of fun.”

“We just wanted to change things up a bit, start integrating my vocals a bit more and give Cam a bit of a break when we’re playing live. We’re kind of dividing the vocals, not quite equally, but just sprinkling in here and there.”

The band met up in London, Ont., to record TV Dinner with longtime collaborator and friend Simon Larochette. Every Wine Lips album except their first has been made alongside Larochette at his studio, The Sugar Shack, which Hilborn speaks about affectionately.

“It’s an awesome studio. When I was first demoing songs I thought we might try somewhere new,” he says. “But we ended up going back with him because he’s so easy to work with.”

The final product is deliciously chaotic—but if the album were an actual TV dinner, what would it be?

“I’m thinking it would be a side of broccoli cheddar soup with some pad Thai slipped on top… whatever we were eating when we were out making the record,” Evans says. “Lots of sloppy soup and some cheap Thai food.”

“It’s funny because the original album art was like gruesome body parts and stuff,” Hilborn says. “The label didn’t like it though, they thought it was a little too graphic and disgusting.”

The idea of human body parts becoming a microwavable dinner feels fitting for an album that finds humour in the bleakest and strangest corners of modern life.

“At the time, there were all those conspiracies about the Epstein files and eating people, and then I went down this rabbit hole that McDonald’s burgers are all made of human meat,” he continues. “So I was like yeah, this makes total sense.”

It’s the kind of bizarre internet rabbit hole that feels right at home on TV Dinner, where conspiracy, anxiety and online absurdity are never far from the surface.

At the time of our conversation, the band is about two weeks away from heading out on a four-month tour that will first take them to Europe and then back to North America.

For Evans and Hilborn, there’s nothing quite like taking the new songs on the road and experiencing the reaction to them live.

“If people aren’t dancing, moving around, we feel like we’re doing something wrong,” Hilborn says. “If people are jumping around and moshing and having a good time, that’s what we’d like to see.”

With the band members now living in different postal codes, Evans is looking forward to spending some time together on the road.

“I’m looking forward to playing the new songs, hanging out with everyone.”

“We’re all going to be crammed in a van, so we’ll be sick of each other after a couple weeks,” she jokes.

Ironically, there may be plenty more TV dinners in Wine Lips’ future as they make their way through Europe. For a band that has built its fifth album out of cheap food, bad news and the increasingly bizarre experience of modern life, it feels strangely appropriate.