Billy Talent will headline Toronto's Edgefest this summer and play select festival dates in Quebec and Ontario, but other than that the Toronto rock band will go into hibernation to work on the follow-up to 2003's self-titled debut.

"You can't over-saturate yourself. You just have to go away. No one cares all the time," believes frontman Ben Kowalewicz.

"We were supposed to be in the studio right now, like right now, this month, but we got home after touring and it's been a pretty f**kin' crazy two years and we were really burned out. We took a month off just to vegetate and rejuvenate our relationships with our loved ones and family, and have been writing since."

After lining up Toronto producer Gavin Brown once again, and going so far as to book then cancel studio time in Vancouver and the Bahamas, the band has decided not to give into industry pressure and rush the next album.

"Everyone was like, 'You need to go into the studio,' the whole industry standard joke of 'It takes 10 years to write your first record and two months to write your second.' And we were like, 'Why? Why?'" says Kowalewicz emphatically. "Why do people rush their second album when it's really the most important, especially now, for us? So we just put the f**kin brake on and told everyone to relax and sit quietly by and when we're done, we'll give it them.

"This is the point where everyone seems to forget in the biz, that without the songs nothing else happens," he adds. "So we release a bag of sh*t album, then the agents can't book us and the record won't sell very well, then no one gets anything."

Who's gonna argue with a band recently validated with a pair of 2005 Juno Awards (album of the year and group of the year) and weekly sales that have kept the album in the Nielsen SoundScan Canada top 100 chart for 82 weeks (currently it's No. 32 and has scanned 241,000 units). With its pistol-whipping intensity and Kowalewicz's raw, yelping, and surprisingly melodic voice, the band has been a breath of fresh air in Canada, amid all punk-pop and basic CanRock releases.

The U.S. proved a tougher sell. Signed to Atlantic in the States, which has a co-venture agreement with Warner Music Canada, Billy Talent scanned a decent 84,500 copies south of the border, but nowhere near its potential. "It's enough to have a really good touring fan base," counters Kowalewicz. "Close to 100,000 records is pretty f**kin good in my mind, if not in the industry's. (That's) 100,000 humans in a different country."

While the ball on such a great album was dropped somewhere along the line, the band, which didn't even have management when it first signed its record deal, recently switched from America's Mosaic Media Group to a new management company, and, again, one of the best -- Nettwerk, headquartered in Vancouver with offices around the world.

When it was looking for management back in 2003, Kowalewicz, bassist Jon Gallant, drummer Aaron Solowoniuk, and guitarist Ian D'Sa never even talked with Nettwerk. "They don't really take a lot of acts and I guess at the time we were another dime-a-dozen signing and now we've actually proved ourselves," Kowalewicz says.

This time, Billy Talent took many meetings and with a double-platinum album under its belt there were many managers champing at the bit. "We met with a lot of big fat-cat American dudes," says Kowalewicz, affecting a cheesy old-school shyster voice. "'I'll make you a star, kid!' That kind of vibe."

They sat down with Nettwerk Productions CEO Terry McBride and Nettwerk Management's senior vice-president Pierre Tremblay during Canadian Music Week in early March. "Going on reputation, everything they touch has turned to gold," says Kowalewicz of their final choice. "They've managed to crack a lot of bands from Coldplay to Skinny Puppy to Sum 41 and Avril Lavigne and we like the fact that they are an international company but they're Canadian. That goes a long way with us."

Tremblay was told Billy Talent was looking for management about two weeks before they all met. He had already seen the band perform briefly on the 2004 Juno Awards and then took in its Commodore Ballroom show in Vancouver last fall (when the band still had management). He says he "fell in love" with the album after that.

"This band is perfect for Nettwerk," Tremblay says. "They're really talented, but they also have an impeccable work ethic and they're really nice guys that have a social conscience, which is important to us."

And just as important to the band -- no pressure to pump out a new album. "I'm 100 per cent behind that," says Tremblay. "The pressure should just be on making a great record."

Nettwerk, which briefly had a relationship with Atlantic through the artist Poe but still knows many of the executives and staff, has it own strategy to make sure the next album gets a proper shot in America.

"I think it's all about set up," says Tremblay. "Making sure the set up is done properly even before the next record is launched. Even before the next single goes to radio, the set up has to be done. And, in this case, with a band as talented as they are live, it's mainly about doing some touring before we bring anything to radio, before we drop the record at retail. There's also other set up things that we'll be working on like film/TV placement, video game placement, just anything that we can do to make sure that this record is set up properly."

Billy Talent came off the road in November and has been consistently writing since January. They have six to eight songs "kind of done." Kowalewicz doesn't have names for the songs yet, but says D'Sa's writing is "genius."

"He's gotten so much better and more mature and it's very moving. Even when we sit there and write it, I get goosebumps and shivers just listening. We're really excited to release it and we know that if we do take our time and we're happy with it, it doesn't matter what anyone thinks.

"It's also really nice to be home and be working on this," he adds. "Ian brought up a really good point. When you're writing, you're writing about life experiences that you've had, but in order to replenish that pool, you need to live. And the last thing I want to do is write songs, like (sings) 'Sitting in the van, driving across America...' Who cares? I'm not writing a song for truckers. That doesn't interest me. So we're living again and we're having experiences."

Realistically, he says the band should be in the studio in June with Brown.

Meanwhile, even though they are in retreat mode, they couldn't pass up headlining Edgefest on Canada Day (July 1). "It's just so much fun," says Kowalewicz, who used to work at the radio station The Edge as a Live On The Edge producer in 2001. "It's wicked. I remember playing the third stage three or four years ago and getting there and having to set up the stage ourselves and put it all together just in order to play. And now how the tides have turned." More Lowdown stories