Jon Perks talks to Fyfe Dangerfield about Guillemots' new album, which takes the band in a new direction.

For Guillemots, “conventional” means you don’t have the metronomic clattering of typewriters as part of the rhythm section.

But that’s not to say their third album Walk The River is middle-of-the-road mediocrity or songwriting by numbers.

Far from it.

Described by frontman Fyfe Dangerfield as songs which sound “as if they were being heard through the night sky, sleepwalking their way onto tape”, the new long player was created over 18 months of experimenting and playing together as a band; three weeks in Snowdonia, followed by recording “in a really boring industrial estate in London”.

A band’s third album is often difficult, where creative blocks and tensions threaten to derail the artistic flow and commercial success of its predecessors.

“I don’t know; I think every album can be difficult,” says the Birmingham-born singer. “I would say that with us it was the second one that was difficult, not the third.

‘‘Making this record had difficult moments like any record has done but it wasn’t a difficult process – it was a pretty joyous one.”

Since the release of their second album Red, neither Dangerfield nor Guillemots have lain idle.

While Dangerfield released solo album Fly Yellow Moon and enjoyed chart success with a cover of Billy Joel’s Always A Woman (courtesy of being used in a John Lewis TV ad), he and the rest of the band – the wonderfully named MC Lord Magrão, Greig Stewart and Aristazabal Hawkes – continued to play and work together on the follow-up record.

“We started doing it I think May last year or June, but the solo stuff didn’t really take up that much of my time and we did gigs here and there and the recording itself was very minimal,” insists Dangerfield.

“I keep getting asked ‘what it’s like being back with the band?’

‘‘I kind of haven’t really stopped being with the band beyond about three months apart two years ago, so it’s just that we’ve been writing and doing stuff behind closed doors, I guess.”

With the title track and single The Basket (complete with fabulously trippy ‘camping’ video) to whet appetites, fans can look forward to hearing much of the new album when Guillemots play a secret gig in Birmingham in early April.

Dangerfield also appears solo that week as part of Ikon Eastside’s Rites of Spring festival of music, which marks the end of the Digbeth arts venue’s short life.

Ask Dangerfield what the likes of new album tracks Vermillion, Tigers and Dancing In The Devil’s Shoes are all about, and the 30-year-old is as cryptic as he is talented:

“I wouldn’t begin to say what these things are about, they just feel their way out,” he says.

“I think there was a feeling across the whole record of somebody lost and wanting to find a home again and not being quite sure how to.

‘‘We imagined a ‘lost in space’ theme – but then that makes it sound like a concept album, and it’s not.

“The album’s a pretty dreamy record; the title track probably in terms of representative of the album gives a better idea what the record sounds like. The Basket is definitely one end of it, definitely some tracks I would say are more poppy, but then others are more drawn out and then there’s stuff in the middle.

He adds: “I think there’s definite variety on the record, but it’s a more coherent record than the ones we’ve done before, certainly more than the last one.

“The big difference is it’s the first record we’ve done as a band where it’s [just] about the four of us. Both our previous records we’ve had lots of people like strings and brass; on the second, even when it was us playing, we were playing instruments we don’t normally play.

‘‘On this one, it very much came out of the four of us playing in a room, together.”

* Walk The River is out on April 18 Fyfe Dangerfield plays Ikon Eastside, Digbeth on April 9 as part of the Rites of Spring festival – tickets from www.theticketsellers.co.uk or call 0844 870 0000 Guillemots play a secret Birmingham date on April 10; details at www.guillemots.com