Alice Glass was once Margaret Osborn from Oakville, a suburb of Toronto. Since her parents worked in the city, she was mostly raised by cool teenage-girl babysitters. Until dropping out at 15, Glass went to Catholic school; she had an overwhelming feeling everyone was wrong when they said hell was real, but was comforted by the rituals and cool incense smells. Sitting on the floor of her and Keyes’ basement studio, she recalls how confession took place in the same room where teachers performed physical inspections: “We could never tell if we were going there for sins or for head lice.” At one point, she single-handedly started a head lice plague after rolling around in a field. “Junior high is hard enough without giving someone parasites,” she concludes with a mortified laugh.

Back then, Glass’ reputation as the weird kid morphed into a reputation as the bad kid. She was permanently banned from the school bus after accidentally setting off the emergency alarm while trying to stop some boys from stealing a badge she’d won in a poetry contest. Walking home, Glass would make up melodies in her head to pass the time. At 11, she got her first guitar for Christmas and began writing four-chord punk songs. Her seventh grade Green Day cover band lost at the school talent show; by ninth grade, she’d moved on to an At the Drive-In cover band, which she liked because the guitar parts were easier for her small hands to play.

By 15, Glass left school and ran away from home, where life was bleak and lonely. “Things were not great between me and my dad; he had some anger problems,” she says. “And I was really depressed and self-harming. I’d think about killing myself a lot, and I just knew that if I stayed there I would.” She started an all-girl punk band, Fetus Fatale, who would play for a pitcher of beer at a local bar. Around this time, Glass met Kath; she was 14, he was 24. She’d seen videos of his band, Kill Cheerleader, on an after-midnight local showcase on TV. He began inviting her to gigs and showed a strong interest in her music; that someone like him believed in her made Glass feel talented for the first time. “Claudio said that he self-harmed as well, and it just made me feel like I wasn’t completely alone,” she says. “I didn’t feel like my life had too much value. In a lot of ways, I feel like he could have almost been anyone.”

Thus, Crystal Castles was born, a perfect storm of electroclash, video game glitches, and feral punk that stood completely apart from its peers—ravier than the dance-punks, scarier than the bloghouse bands. In her former groups, Glass had written songs and played guitar but she had never actually sung out loud. “The first couple of Crystal Castles shows, I remember people booing me,” she says. “And at some point I was like: I don’t really give a fuck—even if you think I’m terrible, I’m the one with the microphone, so joke’s on you, asshole.”

The band took off faster than anyone expected. They became a regular presence on the festival circuit and headlined endless tours, with Glass accumulating concussions and a broken ankle due to her chaotic stage antics. “I didn’t really have a life at all,” she recalls. In between tours, she would be given a couple of weeks to write over pre-recorded instrumentals; throughout their eight years together as a band, she says there was never one time that she and Kath worked on a song in the same room together. Years later, sitting down with Keyes to write a song from the ground up felt like learning a new language.

When I ask if she ever had fun during the Crystal Castles years, she answers without hesitation: “Only on stage—that was the only time that someone couldn’t get into my head. It was just me and a microphone and the audience, so it was really freeing. But people didn’t see what would happen immediately after I walked offstage, when [Kath] would be cutting me down: ‘You danced horribly at this part, you sounded terrible at this, your thighs looked too big today.’” She was warned to avoid after-parties on the off chance someone might snap an unflattering photo, ruining her mysterious image. “And I was like, ‘Well, I can’t argue with that,’” she admits. “That was how brainwashed I was.”

When Glass would threaten to leave the band in their final years together, Kath would call her a high-school dropout, sarcastically asking if she wanted to work at Burger King instead. “So I started to romanticize working at Burger King,” she remembers. She thought about how quitting Crystal Castles to flip burgers would mean that she could at least hang out with her friends and have her own phone. At that moment, she realized that she was done with Crystal Castles. “Is this how I want to spend the rest of my life?” she remembers thinking. “Is this what I want to be doing?” There was no other option; that was the end.

Listening to old Crystal Castles songs these days is a bizarre experience—one that is nearly impossible to enjoy. “I avoided listening to them for years,” Glass affirms when I ask what it’s like having so much recorded music with such profound baggage attached. “But I worked eight years of my life on this, and I wrote these words and melodies. I can’t let somebody take that away. There are some songs that I’m never going to fucking listen to again. But there are certain songs, when I listen to them now, I only hear me. I don’t hear anyone else.”

Fuzzy strolls in, spotlit in the dark basement studio by the occasional beam of colored light. “He likes this because I’m talking about intense things,” Glass says affectionately. “He loves watching every Charles Manson documentary.”