Lucas Silveira wears his scars -- the emotional ones along with the physical ones -- with pride.

That's the reason the "trans-man" vocalist of Toronto-based The Cliks appears topless on the cover of the group's latest album, Dirty King, the sutured incisions from sex change surgery etched across his chest.

The band has come a long way since their 2006 breakthrough Snakehouse, but Silveira's muse remains the same.

Songs are born from a place of deep turmoil, says Silveira.

Ruminations on gender politics and sexual identity are intertwined throughout much of the group's material.

But the songs on Dirty King, while retaining the same raw edge and urgency that have become hallmarks of the band's sound, now display a certain maturity -- a sense that Silveira, as he puts it, is walking in his "confident shoes."

With Snakehouse, Silveira was still dealing with the realization he was transgendered. Family illness and defecting band members only added to the chaos.

"It was a big change in my life at that time and I think a lot of that came out on the album. I was changing in so many ways, and not just the obvious," he says.

"What I completely didn't expect was that I would become closer to myself and realize who I was."

Silveira was almost resigned to the idea The Cliks would never achieve the sort of commercial success he had worked so hard for.

Cue the breakthrough.

"I had given up all aspirations of becoming a commercial artist, and that's right when we got picked up," says Silveira.

The Cliks fell in with Canadian alt-rock pioneer Moe Berg of The Pursuit of Happiness fame, who hooked the group up with starmaking manager Jake Gold.

Within months, The Cliks were picked up by Cyndi Lauper's True Colors tour, and after a whirlwind journey across the continent, they were handpicked by The Cult's Ian Astbury for another lengthy tour.

A year and a half later, Silveira returned to Toronto bruised and battered, road weary but a little wiser.

Four hundred days on the road can do that to you.

"The road is a very strange place," he says. "It can really beat you down, but you have to learn to function in this surreal world.

"It can end up making you feel a little unbalanced, and you start isolating yourself because you start losing trust in what you're feeling and you start losing trust in the people around you."

But out of that isolation and world-weariness comes Dirty King, a finely polished gem that sees the group delving into string-laden acoustic numbers to counterbalance their raw punk attack.