To call PUP a “relevant distraction” is, admittedly, selling the boisterous Toronto punk quartet a bit short, but it’s a nice turn of phrase nonetheless.

Drummer Zack Mykula has hit upon a succinct way of summarizing the band’s growing popular appeal — PUP plays the biggest hometown show of its career at the 5,000-capacity Echo Beach on Sunday, July 21 — as it pertains to this year’s celebrated Morbid Stuff LP, in any case.

A stupidly catchy and thoroughly good-humoured collection of shout-along anthems about lead singer/guitarist Stefan Babcock’s running battle with depression, the album is like a big, warm hug from a close friend who’s finally lured you out of your darkened apartment after three days in bed telling you you’re not alone, you’re not the first person to be sad and you will get through this — but also that, from time to time, you need to get over yourself and think about why you’re always so miserable.

Babcock, who memorably spits, “I’m losing interest in self-help / Equally bored of feeling sorry for myself” on Morbid Stuff’s stormy meta-climax “Full-Blown Meltdown” with zero self-sympathy, concedes that maybe poking fun at your own mental illness isn’t for everybody. But it was important to him, he says, that he didn’t drag PUP’s third album down into this pit of endless wallowing. It wouldn’t have been right.

“Lyrically, all of the records are kind of like a six-month to yearlong snapshot of what’s happening in my brain. And this one, obviously, comes from a dark place,” he says over beers with Mykula, guitarist Steve Sladkowski and bassist Nestor Chumak a few hours before PUP was to mount a sold-out, two-night stand at the Danforth Music Hall on a Friday evening in early June.

“But when I started writing, I hated what I was doing because it just sounded like bad, sh---y emo. It was so self-pitying and ‘woe is me’ and that’s not how I feel, so it was strange that that was how it was coming out. And that’s not the kind of band that we are. The music is fun, there’s a lot of energy that exists between the four of us whether we’re playing or not.

“So it was pretty conscious on my part at a certain point to make sure that I was talking about this stuff as real as possible, but not in a self-pitying way. And the way that I’ve kind of been able to do that with myself is to try to be as self-aware as possible and to kind of make fun of myself for all of the sh---y qualities that I have,” he says.

“Anything that’s sh---y is our own doing or our own brains because we’re four really lucky guys. So it’s important — for me, anyways — to sort of step back and get some perspective on the situation once in awhile.”

Mykula, who’s as upfront about his own bouts with mental illness as Babcock, likewise sees the juxtapositions between gravitas and humour at work on Morbid Stuff as ultimately having an almost therapeutic effect, at least in context.

“I’ve always taken trying to be mentally healthy very seriously and there’s a time to be serious, but I think our function is to be kind of, like, that relevant distraction that snaps you out for a second and you can get better perspective on your problems,” he says. “At least that’s what I hope it does. Because sometimes you need that.”

That PUP is a distraction relevant to rock ’n’ roll fans in increasing numbers has been affirmed in its July 21 booking at Echo Beach, not to mention actual mainstream Billboard chart appearances for Morbid Stuff — a No. 15 debut in Canada and even No. 115 on the U.S. Hot 200 — upon its release this past April.

The band nevertheless confesses to being somewhat mystified that anyone would gamble on them playing another Toronto venue, especially one of this size, so quickly after two more successful outings in the market at the 1,400-capacity Danforth Music Hall just a month and a half earlier.

But, then again, PUP’s transatlantic spring “Morbid Stuff Tour-Pocalypse” sold so well that the ridiculously hard-touring foursome — which set itself the goal of playing 200 dates in a year after the release of its eponymous 2013 debut and wound up playing 250, nearly destroying Babcock’s vocal chords and cueing up the wryly self-referential title of 2016’s The Dream Is Over — is already booked for another three months of touring in North America and overseas through the end of November. The boys aren’t lacking for work.

Nerves seem an odd thing to afflict a band whose success is directly traceable to its rollicking live shows, but PUP will admit to being a little daunted at playing to such a large crowd at Echo Beach. Babcock jokes that its “big plans” for the gig amount to “we’re gonna play our songs slightly louder than we usually do.”

“I have a question: are we supposed to do something special or different?” He laughs. “It’s gonna be … something. We’ve never played a show that big, so who knows? I mean, we’ve done festivals, but there’s so little pressure at festival gigs. We can get up there and just crash and burn in front of 15,000 people and not give a sh--.”

“I’m excited to see a mosh pit in sand,” quips Sladkowski. “That’s what I’m excited to see.”

PUP is, as evidenced by its elevation this year to larger and larger concert spaces, on the verge of becoming very, very big. If contemporary rock radio was in a slightly less dire state and obvious pop hits such as Morbid Stuff’s “Kids” or “Sibling Rivalry” or The Dream Is Over’s SOCAN Songwriting Prize winner “DVP” were permitted to become actual pop hits, in fact, PUP would probably already be very, very big.

These four friends, three of whom have been close since their school days — Babcock came in during the university years — are endlessly grateful for where they find themselves at the moment, regardless. Although none ever dared hope they’d be in a position to make a living from their music when they started PUP as Topanga back in 2010.

“I had, like, an amorphous kind of idea that, in some form, I would be playing music forever. That was my only expectation,” offers Mykula. “And I also expected to work impossibly hard and get almost nothing from it other than my enjoyment. I think we all kind of had that mentality.”

“I don’t feel like we skipped any steps,” says Babcock. “We’ve been playing in bands for a long time, right? And I think that the rewarding thing isn’t, like, putting out a record and suddenly you’re playing to thousands of people wherever, the rewarding thing for us has been in going back to the same places. You know, the first time we headlined in London we played to 40 people and now we’re going back to do two nights in a room the same size as the Danforth. We’ve been to all of these towns so many times — so many times — and every time we go back it gets a little bit better. So we feel like we’ve kind of earned that part of it, just by grinding it out a little bit.”

Babcock jokes that he knew something was up with PUP the first time they had a proper band fight and he realized that everyone was yelling at each other “not because one person was being a piece of sh--, but because everyone cared.”

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Chumak, meanwhile, recalls feeling differently about this band over all the other failed ventures the day they decided to go all in circa PUP and he realized “everyone was on the same page and willing to drain their bank accounts to buy a van to go on tour.”

“That was the first time for any of us where it was just, like, everyone’s ready to throw their lives in the toilet and do this,” he recalls.

“We’ve all been in plenty of bands where one person gives a sh- -,” concludes Mykula. “We just happened to collect the people in those bands that gave a sh--.”