“There's no road that ain't a hard road to travel on,” Sam Roberts sang on “Hard Road”, the first song on his first full-length album, We Were Born in a Flame. But since rising out of Montreal in the early 2000s, Roberts has kept a steady hand on the wheel, staking his place as Canada’s foremost classic-rock torchbearer and pub-stool philosopher in an ever-shifting 21st-century pop landscape. Born in 1974, Roberts fronted the Britpop-inspired band Northstar (formerly known as William) in the late ’90s before rebranding himself as a solo artist, complementing his Anglophilic swagger with more of a humble, heartland-rock aesthetic and cranking out Canadian radio staples (like “Brother Down” and “Don’t Walk Away Eileen”) as durable as denim jackets. But while his snappy ‘n’ Strokesy 2008 hit “Them Kids”—with its “kids don’t know how to dance to rock ‘n’ roll” hook—may have reinforced Roberts’ traditionalist tendencies, he’s since shown a willingness to dress up his arena-ready songcraft in surprising new ways, amassing an Afrobeat arkestra for 2011’s Collider and embracing sci-fi synths on 2016’s Terraform.