"If you look at everything we've done, there's definitely a commonality. Camille [Dalmais, a French singer] recorded an album called Le Fil, and every song has this drone in the background, like a string holding it together. I think that we have something similar with our sound. If you created a Dirty Hit anthology, you could piece together one massive story".

We all grew up fairly upper middle class, so yeah, it's a group of rich kids trying to make music. I think the natural assmption is that our backgrounds helped us, but we did it on our own. Nobody's nana actually knew Princess Margaret or whatever the rumour is, but there were always expectations we tried to defy.

Paper Sea Sisterwives? Is that the name we're keeping? They're the first to hear pieces of them but not the whole thing. Early on, it was different cos we were playing songs before we recorded them, but it's the other way round now. We are no longer trying to build the audience in the same way, which allows us to keep things to ourselves longer. And now that Alan's got that studio space in his house ...

There are two different types of creators: people who churn out genius and people who redo things again and again because they have this idea in their head of what it's meant to be and are trying to make the world match. We're probably somewhere in the middle, depending on the song.

I think we've done some of our best stuff in this era, but when you wait, you also give yourself the opportunity to be more critical, which can be good, obviously, but it can also mean that you go back and revisit things and revise more than you might have before. Or you scrap half an album and start over.