The Cliks’ Lucas Silveira was blown away when his sister brought home the Pretenders’ debut album

As a kid growing up in Portugal, Lucas Silveira got an accidental taste of early-’80s guitar rock that would prove hugely influential on him. The small island in the Azores that he lived on had no record stores, so his older sister would score tunes through a mail-order house that had delivery issues.

“One day this vinyl album came in the mail by mistake,” recalls Silveira on the line from his Toronto home, “and I just remember her carrying it around under her arm. The cover was, like, this tall woman with a full male band, and I was, like, ‘That’s pretty cool.’ I started listening to it and goin’, ‘Holy shit, I’ve never heard anything like this!'”

Silveira had been weaned on Elvis Presley and Portuguese music, so the unexpected arrival of the Pretenders’ self-titled debut hit hard. Nowadays the singer, songwriter, and guitarist leads a quartet called the Cliks that makes straightforward rock with an edgy, in-your-face stance that would do Chrissie Hynde proud.

You can hear it on the upcoming CD, Snakehouse, which opens with the harsh phrase “Fuck your pain away”. The disc was produced by veteran Canuck rocker Moe Berg, whose former band, the Pursuit of Happiness, also caught Silveira’s impressionable ears in the ’80s.

“When I was a kid ‘I’m an Adult Now’ was a big, big hit,” he says, “I remember bopping my head around to that song. Who would have thought that one day I’d be sitting in the studio with Moe?”

While the Cliks favour a no-frills, guitar-bass-drums attack common to both the Pretenders and TPOH, they also take inspiration from non-rocking sources, a case in point being the unlikely cover of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River”.

“A lot of people don’t even know what song that is until we almost get to the chorus,” notes Silveira, whose band plays the Media Club on Monday (April 16). “They’re not expecting an R&B/hip-hop–style song to be covered by a heavy-duty rock band, but I always say the secret to a good song is that you can play it in any genre of music. I really connected with that song, and just wanted to show how pissed off I was. I used it as my therapy, I guess.”

The compelling tunes on Snakehouse came together during a period of anguish and turmoil for the 27-year-old musician. A relationship he’d been in for nearly seven years fell apart, his father suffered a stroke, and Silveira had a nervous breakdown. He was also coming to terms with being a transgendered male, willing to undergo “top surgery” (a double mastectomy) to help find his true self.

“I don’t do hormones,” he points out, “because testosterone changes your voice and really messes up your vocal cords, to the point where you may never be able to sing again. I’m a musician; that’s who I am, mainly. So my priority is my voice.”