At one time, I interviewed a sex worker. Her main gripe was that they're spoken about like commodity, if they're spoken about at all. And the reality is, they're spoken about less in mainstream media than the treatment of livestock or animals. People are more comfortable sending their 18-year-old kid to the frontline in war than they are letting their child go into sex work.

And I'm talking about a very specific type of sex work. It's not to be confused with forced prostitution or sex trafficking. This is very much the contemporary independent sex worker who sets their own rates and decides on locations and who their clients are,.

How would you describe your relationship to the idea of political correctness, which you touch on multiple times on this album?

I mean, political correctness, theoretically and used in the correct environment, is just evolution and intelligence. Accepting that things change and you have to adapt to the way that cultures shift. The idea of being more than tolerant, [which is] actually being understanding.

There does seem to be a difference between what it actually means to be politically correct and the way it’s used in the song “Bad for the Boys,” where the narrator complains about the “PC Brigade.”

Yeah. I would see when a man is challenged on his ideas that he will often resort to something like, “Oh, is the PC brigade going to come get me?” It's like “No, you just haven't thought about it enough.” So I think on the album when I'm using things like “PC brigade,” it's the idea of the uninformed man becoming defensive when his half-baked ideas are challenged.

The idea of political correctness being applied in the field of politics is quite good, but when you're talking about having your life ruined by PC culture because you can't use a certain word in conversation, that's dangerous. If I told someone that my name is Alex, but I was born Alexander, and they insisted on calling me Alexander because that's the way I was born, I'd be like “Sure, but you're a prick.” If someone has a realization that they're more comfortable—in fact, they are [a certain] gender, and someone is like “What were you born as?” it's kind of like what fucking business of it is yours?

You’ve called the album “the story of a couple balancing sex with contemporary family values.” How does that work?

I think it's difficult in the sense that when you think of a family that's comfortable with sex, you kind of think of this creepy nudist family who walk around in Tevas with their dick out.

You know, I think it's where I hope we're approaching an age where parenthood is valued more for the loyalty to the children as opposed to loyalty for an ancient family structure.

Parenting does seem to be an important topic for you—the album opens with the song, “Stepdad,” with a narrator addressing his stepkids. How has that interest developed?

Parenting has always interested me because I used to think that I was going to be a linguist. I wanted to go to university and study linguistics, and then I wanted to do speech therapy with kids. My mom, when she was working earlier in her life, worked with children with learning disabilities. So it's always fascinated me.

And I have, for whatever reason, a really strong archive of memories from my childhood that I can remember vividly. I didn't think it was that special until people started mentioning it, that it was bizarre that I was remembered these things. So I feel like I have a point of reference for how I would like to be treated if I was a kid.