When Sam Roberts titled the first song on his first full-length album “Hard Road,” he wasn’t just referring to the many trials and tribulations of the touring musician — because lord knows we don’t need another song by a sad-sack singer-songwriter about feeling homesick while looking out the van window. On “Hard Road,” Roberts was essentially laying out a map for his career, acknowledging early on that the key to longevity and continued relevance is to never to take the easy route, even if the impressive stats he’s racked up since writing that song — platinum records, No. 1 chart rankings, multiple Juno Awards — could seemingly afford him that luxury. For Roberts’ fourth album, Collider, traveling the hard road meant uprooting himself from his home and family in Montreal, and putting his trust in a stranger to lead the way.

Though the Sam Roberts Band may be named for its singer and primary songwriter, Roberts has long relied on his inner circle — guitarist Dave Nugent, guitarist/keyboardist Eric Fares, bassist James Hall and drummer Josh Trager — to translate his ideas into sound. And on Collider, that circle expanded to include Chicago-based producer Brian Deck, a veteran of acclaimed indie-rock bands Red Red Meat and Ugly Casanova, but also a seasoned studio savant who’s overseen albums by everyone from Modest Mouse to Iron and Wine to Califone to Gomez. In other words, someone who values classic pop songcraft and disorienting sonic experimentation in equal measure.

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Initially, the Sam Roberts Band’s move to Chicago’s Bucktown neighbourhood in the fall of 2010 didn’t feel all that dislocating; as Roberts notes, “it really reminded me of a Montreal neighbourhood. I felt really at home there — we basically developed a routine and visited the same coffee shops and breakfast spots every day, to the point where they’d roll their eyes when we walked through the front door.” But the nature of Collider began to change dramatically as Roberts became more acquainted with the cast of eccentrics surrounding Deck’s Engine Music Studios.

Before long, Roberts had Deck putting in phone calls to Califone percussionist Ben Massarella and Antibalas woodwind wizard Stuart Bogie (who’s also lent his lungs to recordings by TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs). On Collider, Massarella and Bogie effectively become the sixth and seventh members of the Sam Roberts Band — the duo make their presence immediately known on the album’s colossal opening track “The Last Crusade,” which begins as a simmering soul shuffle before gradually intensifying into a brass-blasted Afro-funk blowout. But Bogie and Massarella’s role on this album amounts to more than just firing up the Sam Roberts Band’s latent funkiness on tracks like “Let It In” and adding a Sticky Fingers swing to “Sang Froid”; rather, the process of opening up the songs to accommodate their guest contributions forced the band to refine and refocus their own playing. Collider is noticeably bereft of the amped-riffs and scorching guitar solos that define the Sam Roberts Band’s powerhouse live performances. Instead, the guitars are mostly a textural tool to emphasize the rhythm, a tactic that ultimately shines a greater light on Roberts’ instantly familiar melodies and lyrical wisdom, and yields some of his most affecting performances to date.

And that’s ultimately what Collider is about for Sam Roberts — musical exploration as a vehicle for emotional introspection. Despite what the album’s opening track might tell you, this is not the last crusade he’s on — but the point is that it should feel like it. “There’s got to be some desperation to your writing,” Roberts concludes. “You’ve got to maintain that feeling of survival — that you can lose your grip at any time. That’s where songs like these come from — from the realization that you can never figure it out completely, that your grip can never hold on forever. It’s always there, every time I sit down to write. That’s why the record is called what it is: ideas collide, especially when you’re making music. But when you take things that are seemingly different, you can smash them together and create something new.”