Hello Adam from The Music. Reading your press release, alarm bells start ringing because it talks about how you weren't happy with the last album but now you're back with "hunger and vigour". You know they say that about every band, right?

Ha ha. I think they say that about a lot of bands because what happened to us is quite common; it happens to a lot of bands. You've got a lot of time to write your first album and, if you're successful, you'll be expected to do a lot of touring. Then you come to make the second album, and with record company pressures you've got to do this in two or three months - writing and recording - so a lot of successful bands find that the second album isn't what they wanted it to be. And then we went back on the road again and it destroyed our love of doing it, basically. Second album syndrome.

You need to have a bit of time off and rediscover your love of creating music, and that's what we've done. And we rediscovered our friendships as well, because we all fell out from spending so much time together.

So anyone who likes second album 'Welcome To The North' is a stupid idiot?

No, no! It wasn't a bad record, it's a great record. I'm really proud of it. I think we did a fantastic job with not a lot of time. We had eight weeks to write the f**king thing and it's taken us two and half years to write this new one (and about the same to write the first one). The thing that upset us was that it wasn't what we wanted it to be. And it didn't sell as much as the first record. And we got dropped by the f**king record company. We took that as a blow.

It's still one of your children, just one you don't like as much. So now you're back, where's the inspiration come from for this record?

Robert doesn't listen to a lot of music, which sometimes works to his advantage because it makes his melodies pure. But at the same time, inspiration is a massively important thing, it's taken us along time to realise that. So we listened to a lot of stuff like Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, and Talking Heads and a lot of Massive Attack and Sigur Ros. We'd sit in my bedroom studio, where we wrote the album, and some days, if we didn't feel like writing, we'd sit and listen to music all day and get ideas. That way of writing has really rejuvenated us. It's been really important for Robert too, to excite him. Because Robert's useless unless he's excited. When he's excited he's f**king genius.

Looking at the current music scene, where do you think you fit in?

I don't think we do. I think we're entirely unique. But maybe that's just me being biased. There's a bit in 'Get Through It' that sounds like The Chemical Brothers and bits in 'Idle' that sound like Massive Attack but you couldn't pin us down to one genre.

There's some interesting stuff going on, but a lot of people seem to be doing what we did six or seven years ago; watered down versions of what we did. It seems like they're consciously trying to blend dance music and guitar music, and that's not what we were trying to do - it's just what happened when our four musical minds met in a room. I think it's blatant when it's not genuine, and with us it's genuine.

If we interview you again in a year, what do you think we'll be talking about?

I think we'll probably be talking about how people consume music, I think that'll have changed even more. A lot of our fans, who bought 'Welcome To The North', won't necessarily have downloaded before. So that's interesting. I'd like to do some kind of free downloads because one thing we wanna do is be as prolific as possible. We didn't wanna spend four years away, it just took us that long to make something we were proud of. It took us two years to actually start talking again!

Never go to bed on a cross word. Thanks Adam from The Music.

The Music 'Strength In Numbers' is out now