Canadian super-group the New Pornographers are playing in Canberra for the first time in 2020

Legend had it that The New Pornographers was a reference to the claim made by American evangelist Jimmy Swaggart that rock and roll was "the new pornography".

In fact, Newman says, he came up with the name after watching a Japanese film called The Pornographers.

But it's taken 20 years and eight studio albums for the Canadian band - or super-group, as it's often referred to - to officially acknowledge that the band's name can cause problems, at least when it comes to merchandise. Playing their classic power pop to at least a couple of generations of punters has meant new requirements on the merch table.

They've just released a new t-shirt for kids, with 'The News Photographers' emblazoned across it; Newman reckons it's sheer genius.

"It's so close that you don't even notice that it's different. Your brain sometimes just fills in the blanks," he says.

"A lot of people have been asking that we make adult versions of that t-shirt, so I think we will."

It's also a concession that the New Pornographers have been around for so long that a large enough proportion have kids that need their own line of t-shirts, not to mention the legions of fans who can't see themselves wearing one of the band's shirts to work, no matter how permissive their workplace.

Did Newman not foresee this when coming up with a catchy name two decades ago?

"You know, I sort of did, but I couldn't think of a better version," he says, on the phone from San Francisco, where the band has just kicked off a six-week tour.

"In the end I thought it's just gotta be The New Pornographers, it's just what it has to be."

The band's most recent album, In the Morse Code of Break Lights, is exactly what a fan would hope for - slightly off-kilter indie-rock, with thoughtful lyrics and some killer hooks, and a steady revolving platform of instrumentals and vocals. A fan might also wonder how the band has managed to stay so consistent: this year will mark 20 years since its first record, Mass Romantic, came out, and it, with almost every subsequent release, has been lauded and played on high rotation as the gold standard of its genre. Morse Code is no exception, and Newman puts this down to having as much fun as possible while doing it.

It helps, he says, that many of the members have side projects, and all had their own place in the Vancouver music scene before forming the band. Newman, for example, releases solo records under the name A.C. Newman, while Neko Case, with whom he often shares songwriting duties, is considered a Canadian treasure and was recently profiled in The New Yorker.

"On this record, I've written the songs, but it's always been pretty mellow, I think because everybody has their different projects," he says.

"Nobody gets weird about it, nobody's fighting to get their songs on the record, nobody's incredibly hung up if their part gets cut from a record, and that just makes everything a little smoother.

"I guess that's the heart of it - we're friends, and 20 years later we like each other like we did when we started the band."

He says the new album's title is a reference to the lives many of us now lead online - together in a massive, worldwide community, but also, ultimately, alone.

"I began to notice a theme of cars showing up in the songs, so I thought, let's keep going in that direction," he says.

"I think I liked the idea of a lot of people driving in their cars, completely separate, completely solitary, and the only way they communicate is through blinking their brake lights to each other in Morse code. I guess it seemed like a good metaphor for the internet as well, the way we interact. We're connected together but we're still a bunch of people in solitude, interacting.

"And ultimately I just looked at the words and liked the way that sounds, it's a good combination of vowels and consonants. It sounded nice."

And while the band's albums have often have sombre streaks running through them - something to do with life and the human condition - you'd be forgiven for noticing an even darker undertone in the latest offering.

It is, he says, unavoidable if you happen to live in America in this day and age.

"I feel like if you live in America and you have any kind of empathy, it's a hard place to live, because there's so much injustice that it just fills you with a low-level, constant rage-sadness," he says.

"It comes out accidentally, and sometimes in a very obvious way. I think there's always been a darkness in our records. We sound happy, but there's a sort of sadness that runs through a lot of it. I really think a lot of it is just that the world is darker now, and even when you try and keep it out, it gets in there. It's unavoidable, because you open up the internet every day and there's some new crazy thing to make you angry.

"And then when you have a kid, you have to try and figure out a way to project a world to them that is better than it is. It's almost like that movie Life is Beautiful, you're trying to keep them in this sort of bubble for as long as possible, that the world is a better, kinder place."

In the meantime, though, Newman loves observing, with fascination, the different people who listen to music - his and others - and how they come across the New Pornographers.

"Sometimes I wonder, are there new people finding our music all the time? I don't know," he says. "Are all our fans just the same people from 10 years ago?"

Given that the band now requires a special-edition, lightly censored t-shirt for kids, there's a fair chance many of the fans are growing and ageing right alongside Newman and his cohort.