Earlier this year, Miesha and the Spanks did a series of shows in Toronto with Thunder Queens, a London, Ont., act made up of teenagers.

They were all-ages shows, which meant they finished early. Thunder Queens would drive home to London every night with their parents.

“We were back at the hotel by 10:30 p.m. every night,” says Miesha Louie, in an interview from her home in Calgary. “It was like, ‘What is this dream? We can get a good sleep before we drive the next day.’ That was a real ‘Wow, times have changed’ moment for us.”

Back in 2010, Louie did an interview with Postmedia to preview an early Miesha and the Spanks album, and she shared some journal entries written while touring in an RV with the Toronto band DCT. It included details about vomiting tourmates, being stuck in close quarters with six sweaty males who hadn’t showered in days and how the entourage had to make a panicky run to the beer store before it closed on Day 1 of the tour.

Louie is now married and the mother of seven-year-old twin boys and a six-month-old daughter. Miesha and the Spanks’ new EP, Visions — which will be released Sept. 18 — opens with a 16-second introduction of Miesha practising a riff on a toy guitar as her two boys chatter.

Louie and her bandmate, drummer Sean Hamilton, did not have any theme in mind when writing the eight songs on the new album, but themes did emerge. Both are music “lifers,” but things change when life happens.

“It was a little bit of coming-of-middle-age, maybe,” Louie says. “It’s that reflection of where things are at and what I expected. I was so dialled into music and my career was my main focus; that was all I was planning for. When I met my husband, that all changed. Now I’m still doing all those things, but the path has changed a bit because I have a family. I don’t live in the van on the road anymore. But I still get out there quite a bit. I’ve just adapted things to fit my life.”

Louie formed Miesha and the Spanks in 2008 as a duo. Over the years, she has played with a number of drummers. Hamilton has been her musical partner for more than a decade, which is the longest tenure of any bandmate. Still, this stability has not dulled the sharp edges of the band’s heavy, punk-rooted guitar-drum assault, nor has it softened Louie’s lyrical tone as she delves into timely subjects with a powerful directness.

The catchy Good Boys, for instance, was directly inspired by her sons.

“There are all these different thoughts on masculinity right now,” she says. “How do we make boys good and not let them land in some spot where they are not great guys? Every time there is a high-profile case where there has been sexual assault, there are always people who jump up and say, ‘Oh, their future! They are good boys. They just did this bad thing.’ What makes these boys good? It was just searching around the idea about what is a good boy and how do I raise one.'”

On the pummeling Fight My Body, Louie takes a personal look at body image.

“I was looking at all the times I was trying to make my body be a certain way,” she says. “My weight would go up and down, and I was always trying to be strong enough to be on tour. It’s about what we try to do to make our body do something.  All of us have had struggles with our bodies. As I was releasing it, I had the new postpartum body again to deal with. So it became really real again. A lot of people have talked to me about that song, and I think it means different things to different people because we all have a reason to fight with our bodies. It’s the longest relationship we’re ever going to have.”

The 34-second interlude Leq’ wepe begins with a newscaster talking about outgoing Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson’s election ads boasting about her decision to not search a landfill for the remains of First Nations women believed to have been murdered. It’s followed by Stefanson’s own muted apology. It leads to the album’s angriest track, the thundering Can I Scream.

Louie began exploring her Indigenous roots with her 2023 album, Unconditional Love in Hi-Fi. Louie’s family on her late father’s side is Secwepemc, or Shuswap.

“With that particular song, it was during the protests about searching the landfill and the premier was saying it wasn’t safe at the time and using it as an election slogan. I played a big show in Winnipeg. I’m not going to throw the other bands under the bus or anything, but it was in the thick of it, and they were political punk bands, and nobody said anything on stage about searching the landfill. It was people I had assumed would. I’m not mad at them for not (saying anything), but it was a bit of an eye-opener.”

Even before Louie began writing material for Visions, she set her sights on Toronto-based producer Hill Kourkoutis. Louie admired her studio skills, particularly her work on the 2021 album The Fool by SATE. It turns out, the feeling was mutual. Louie and Hamilton recorded with Kourkoutis at OCL Studios outside of Calgary and at the producer’s home studio in Toronto. In Toronto, they stayed with Kourkoutis. In Calgary, she stayed at Louie’s house.

“She came trick-or-treating with me and my kids in the middle of making the record,” Louie says. “We helped her dye eggs for Greek Easter when we were staying at her house for her big Easter thing. We were really involved in each other’s lives while we were making the record. We had this special closeness that we really hadn’t had before.”

Kourkoutis helped Miesha and the Spanks maintain their high-octane, energetic punk roots on the record. Despite motherhood, stability and domesticity, it’s a sound that still comes naturally to Louie.

“As a mom, there’s a lot of pent-up stuff,” she says. “You are putting everybody in the house ahead of you, so when I do get to go to the garage and turn up the amps, I would say I’m playing the heavier stuff I’ve played in a while. No slight to my family, but there is a lot of unseen weight on your shoulders. I’ve never had to self-regulate so much in my life to make sure I’m calm and OK for everybody else. Then, in my music, I get to let that out. I’m so grateful I have that outlet. I wonder, ‘What do other moms do?’ ”

Miesha and the Spanks will play Highland Brewing on Friday, Sept. 18 and a matinee show at Pinbar on Saturday, Sept. 19. Visions will be released Sept. 18.