Call Propagandhi whatever you like: Political punks, vegan activists, musical pranksters, or even -- to quote their record label -- "four visibly aging prairie skids" who are "unrepentant residents of humankind's peanut gallery."

But you can't call them The Three Stooges of local punk any more.

"It's The Four Stooges now," corrects guitarist Chris Hannah, the main singer and songwriter for the long-serving and globally respected outfit. He's right, of course; a few years ago, the power trio -- Hannah, bassist Todd (The Rod) Kowalski and drummer Jord Samoleski -- added second guitarist Dave (The Beaver) Guillas.

As you might expect from a man named Beaver, he hasn't raised the band's maturity level -- life on the road still consists of "people yelling and farting and hitting each other on the head the whole time," cracks Hannah (who writes under the provocative name Jesus Chris and once campaigned to have himself declared the Worst Canadian).

But one listen to Guillas' first album with the band -- their fifth full-length Supporting Caste -- is all it takes to know he's helped them raise the musical bar.

After more than 20 years together -- a time when many bands are throwing in the towel, resting on their laurels or coasting on fumes -- quality remains job No. 1 for Propagandi. Supporting Caste is the band's most ambitious and accomplished effort, with tighter performances, more personal songwriting and stronger sound (courtesy of former Black Flag and All drummer-turned-acclaimed producer Bill Stevenson) added to their usual mix of hypercomplex thrash and audacious political manifestos about cannibalism, hockey and heavy metal. As the acclaimed band prepared for a new tour that would take them to Australia, the U.S. and Europe -- sandwiched around local stops tomorrow and Saturday night at the Garrick -- here's what Hannah had to say about their new sound, the state of punk and his love of Canuck metalheads Rush.

A new album, a new tour; you guys must be busy. Are you rehearsing a lot?

Yeah, more than we ever have before. And we're going over the songs with a fine-tooth comb, which we never have in the past. It's a tedious process, but it seems to be bearing fruit. We want to raise the bar, really, in terms of performance and tightness. The better you are playing the songs, the more you can enjoy them onstage instead of being anxious. We generally have always played at the edge and beyond the edge of our abilities, and we want to change that because it makes for a better experience. And we're going to be doing a lot shows this year. We've always got away with it, but we want to do more than get away with it.

Listening to the new CD, there's a lot of challenging music on it. I get the sense you were trying to raise the bar there too.

We want each new album to feel like a new element has been added, and to have the general feeling that there has been a general raising of some abstract bar somewhere. Just to keep ourselves interested and listeners interested.

What did you add this time?

Well, for this record, the new element is Beav, our second guitar player. That was the missing link, in retrospect, for a very long time in the band. Not just any second guitar player could have stepped in; I'm talking about Beav specifically. But for me, that improved the songwriting process and it took songs that might otherwise have been good to a higher level. There's more depth and dimension in his playing than when it's just me by myself. And having a second guitar player in the band, at first I thought, 'Oh, this is going to make things so much easier for me.' But I actually have to play about 10 times better because if you're co-ordinated with what the other guy is playing, it sounds even worse. So it's been good for me to step up my guitar playing.

You can really hear the difference if you compare this album to your last CD Potemkin Village. His playing really adds another dimension that Potemkin is lacking.

I'm glad that comes across. That's the way I feel about Potemkin too. I wish we could go back in time and have Beav on that record. That's one of my favourite records, but yeah, it didn't have the dimension and depth it deserved. I think Beav would have been the man to do that.

There seems to be a lot more urgency and intensity on this record? Was that your sense of things?

Not consciously. But I think I had that impression a couple of times during the songwriting process, especially with Todd's songs -- like we were going over the top with intensity. But we don't have a mandate that we have to be crazier than the last record. Whatever happens, happens. But I honestly wasn't sure. Once recording was under way, I was like, 'I hope I'm going to like this as much as the last record.' You never know. And it wasn't until a few weeks ago, when I came out of the post-partum depression I usually go through with a record, that I was like, 'Oh yeah, I much prefer this.'

It seems to take several steps forward in terms of using slower elements and quieter passages in a more integrated way.

Again, that could be credited to having Beav in the band. He's able to make things seem a little more seamless. A lot of my transitions tend to be sort of off and on. And his tend to weave in and out.

Some of these songs also seem to be more revealing and personal than some of your earlier work. I don't recall any song in your past as direct as Without Love.

That song was supposed to be on the last record, actually. But it didn't make it for a number of execution reasons. I think that thematically, there are a lot of songs about the struggle for meaning in people's lives, and in a political sense, what are the consequences of certain forms of meaning that people are drawn to, whether it's religion or race, and some of it's more existential. I think to me there's a thread that ties it all together. But maybe songs like Without Love and Funeral Procession are about the questions somebody asks when they feel they're living in the margins of society -- what does that do for your personal assessment of yourself or for how you find meaning in your life?

Well, you're also at an age when people start to deal with mortality and the deaths of loved ones.

Yeah, for sure. There's definitely going to be a lot more funerals in my future than when I was younger. In my own mind, I've grappled with mortality issues since I was a little kid. But I guess this was just the time and place where they finally made it into a song.

Talking about age, it's impressive that you still have the fire in the belly to do what you do. Punk is generally a young man's game.

I think we draw inspiration or we're cut from the same cloth as Voivod, Razor and Sacrifice, NoMeansNo, SNFU -- they're older than us and they're still doing it. And they're making the best music of their careers in many cases. But in terms of the spotlight the media puts on punk and metal, yeah, it's definitely youth-driven. The bands you see in the magazines are not gonna be a bunch of grey-haired, wrinkle-faced people like us. But to me, that's still where you can find some of the best music -- under the radar. And it's older people making it.

A lot of those bands you named are not bands people would associate with you.

I guess. But we grew up with that music in the early '80s. Sacrifice, Razor and Voivod, for me, were everything I thought about. That metal scene sort of ebbed as death metal came along in the late '80s and early '90s. There was a whole new crop of death metal and grunge bands. And I wasn't really interested in the black metal scene post-1988. But I became much more interested in the hardcore scene. The bands that were truly in the underground were doing and saying things that were far more interesting to me. So I gravitated toward that.

You also mention Rush as an influence in press material for the album. And as soon as I read that, it clicked: There is a huge amount of Alex Lifeson in your guitar style.

Thank you! Rush is in the same category as those other bands, but obviously writ large. I saw them at the Arena last year, and that was the best show I've ever seen there.

Bill Stevenson mixed Potemkin. You went one step further this time and got him to produce. What was behind that?

It was the short experience we had mixing the last record. We were trying to mix it ourselves and we were going crazy. We called him up and said, 'Would you consider doing an emergency mix?' He said OK and we went down to Colorado and had a pretty good three days mixing the record. And we really didn't know anybody else, to be honest, that we had a connection with aesthetically. We thought it would be our best option at this point. And making the record with him, there were some intense moments. It's always intense trying to find some common ground when you have four band members with different visions, and then you add in Bill and (his production partner) Jason Livermore, who also have a vision for how things should go -- and have a very different methodology than we were used to.

In what sense?

In the sense that they had a methodology at all (laughs). We're used to just going in and blasting it out with no real plan in place. And they have a very regimented approach. And I think we kind of reacted to that at first. But as some point I saw the value in it. You reap benefits from having very solid tracks.

How long did it take you to make this?

Three weeks.

Is that the longest it's taken you to make an album?

No. Actually it may be the shortest. Except for the first record, which was maybe six days. But the other records, we'd go in with no plan and try recording, only get a bit of it done, have to go home, book another recording session to finish it, have to redo guitars -- just craziness.

The regimented approach certainly pays off here. This is your best-sounding and tightest album -- everything is spot-on, without being sterile.

There was a battle to get to that point. Bill kept saying that a good negotiation is when none of the parties are happy. That's where we eventually got to -- we felt the record was going in too polished a direction in the mix and we were pulling it the other way while they were saying, 'This is too rough.' It got really intense during that, but eventually we found some common ground. We let them have their way on a few things and they let us have our way on a few things and I think the balance of that worked out.

You're on the local label Smallman now instead of your own G7 Welcoming Committee. What's the status of G7? It seems to be in limbo.

The guy who was running it with me left town, so G7 just wasn't fun any more. And it had been 11 years of me not focusing my entire energy on the band. I thought, 'Why don't I go on a sabbatical and put my energy into the band and see what happens?' And we've already taken a few steps ahead in terms of me having more energy for the band.

Obviously Smallman is a pretty easy fit for you.

I think one of our criteria for going with Smallman was, they live here, so they're within choking distance. And I think they probably feel the same way.

After all these years of trying to educate and inspire listeners, do you ever get discouraged and feel that you're yelling at a brick wall?

Not really. We don't have any delusions of grandeur about what a band can do. If nobody was interested in the band beyond the four of us, the lyrics would be the same. We're just trying to entertain each other in the practice space. The songs are for us as much as for anybody else. I think it would be a bit delusional to gauge it in other ways. Although, anecdotally, we get a lot of feedback from people who say our music has done for them what Millions of Dead Cops or Corrosion of Conformity did for us in the '80s, which is basically offering a different way of seeing the world. Who knows what that translates into in real life? But it keeps us going to some degree.