When frontman Torquil Campbell listens back to songs he recorded with his band Stars two decades ago, he notices one thing in particular.

“I’m struck by how much we were talking about sex,” the Montreal singer/songwriter said this week. “Your obsessions tend to change over the years, but in those songs there was a relation between sex and political activism — There was this energy to us that was both angry and horny. It’s fascinating how driven and urgent we were. I was very influenced by Billy Bragg, and he said once that the way you treat the person next to you is inextricably part of the way you treat the world. So your heart defines your politics, and that to me is what the record was about.”

The album in question is “Set Yourself on Fire,” Stars’ breakthrough album from 2004. To celebrate its 20th anniversary they’re doing a small handful of shows to play the entire album, which they’re doing at Royale on Sunday.

While the album has some of Stars’ most upbeat and catchy tracks, it opens on a more somber note with “Your Ex-Lover is Dead,” which became an underground hit and got a few TV placements. “It was Kevin Drew (Campbell’s sometime bandmate in Broken Social Scene) who convinced us to do that. It’s really a template for the emotional landscape of the album — and it has no chorus, just a bunch of sections put together. In a way it says, ‘This is going to be extreme, and you’d better be prepared for that’.”

Stars always had a split personality, being drawn to the classic pop of the Kinks and the Beach Boys on one hand, and to the darker sounds of the Smiths and New Order on the other. “I don’t think that’s contradictory, because I think every great band in the world is trying to write a hit. The Smiths weren’t consciously an art band, they were sincere in their desire to be the biggest band in the world. Even Lou Reed in the Velvet Underground, he really thought that stuff was going to be on the radio, even if it was demented of him to think so. Everyone takes their desire for success and filters it through their own musical technique, or lack thereof. So I’d say that most of what we think of as avant-garde is really just weirdos trying to write hits.”

A few years ago Stars took the unusual step of writing and performing a play about themselves. The play “Stars: Together” performed in Toronto during 2019 and may yet get done in the US.  For Campbell, who’s also been an actor for most of his life, the band proved a perfect study in personalities.

“There’s our love of jokes, our over-communicative nature, and our disasters. We all have big mouths, we’ve said the wrong stuff about the wrong people and that’s taken a toll. I’ve always said we’re basically a punk band because punk means doing you, it’s not about making changes in response to other peoples’ needs. We’re completely ourselves, and I think that’s why our story resonates. Besides, I think everybody should be in a play about themselves, it’s an interesting form of therapy. You go and repeat all of your mistakes in the form of a story.”