It took Walrus singer-guitarist Justin Murphy a while to get comfortable as a songwriter, not so much because he doubted his talents, but more because he was intimidated by those around him. Sometimes it isn’t easy being a little brother, especially when you’re standing in the tall shadow of an older sibling.

“Most of my friends didn’t really play a ton of music growing up, so the only person I really knew who was in bands was my brother,” says the frontman, on the line from home in Halifax. “He’s four years older than me, so I was always a little intimidated to go ‘Let’s jam,’ or whatever. He’s such a good drummer that I was never really too keen on hopping in. But then when I was 19 I started writing songs. I was into them, and he was into them, so that’s where it started.”

Walrus started out as a bedroom project with Murphy and his brother Jordan, eventually morphing into the quintet that it is today. Since it formed there have been two EPs (2014’s Glam Returns and the follow-up, Goodbye Something) and enough touring to drive four different vans into the ground. On the day we speak, Walrus has just returned from its first European jaunt, the overseas swing in support of its debut full-length, Family Hangover, which is on Dan Mangan’s indie label Madic.

In the tradition of Halifax alternative legends Jale, Wintersleep, and Sloan, guitars are the primary musical weapon for Walrus, with “Later Days” a gorgeously grey-hued exercise in towering postrock and “Step Outside” serving up psych at its dreamiest.

But the greatness of Walrus is how the band sounds like it’s interested in something more than the sound that initially made Sub Pop the greatest indie label in the world. “Tell Me” is twisted country-blues cut from the same cloth as ’90s-vintage Meat Puppets, while “Regular Face” serves as a tip-off that Murphy remains more than a little obsessed with four Liverpool lads who called themselves the Beatles.

“We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves, so it’s important to keep people guessing about what we’re doing,” Murphy says. “That’s also our game plan for the next record—to try and do some new stuff but still keeping it within the pocket of what Walrus does.”

That record is, at the moment, a ways off, with the singer reporting that Walrus will be continuing to tour hard in the coming months across North America. Well aware of its track record with vans, the band now rents them—which makes sense when you’ve literally blown engines in the past.

What hasn’t changed since the beginning, though, is Murphy’s lack of interest in celebrating his work as a songwriter, this despite the fact that his brother isn’t the only person celebrating his brilliance these days.

“I’m happy with the new record, but I guess I’m a pretty humble person. I’m not that great a musician, so it’s the band that really turns the songs into what they are. I’m not too much on tooting my own horn—if it wasn’t for the band I don’t think this would really have come to anything.”

Walrus plays the Biltmore on Friday (June 23).