Nokia

Starts with this fade in of steel drums and marbles in a glass bowl that we'd recorded a while back and which we quite liked as an intro to the record. The actual song grew out of this initial feel and chord progression, and gradually it seemed more and more fitting as an opening track. We use some interesting instruments on this song like timpani and piccolo flute that don't appear anywhere else on the album.

Moonlight Hours was a new thing for us. It's basically a two bar loop that doesn't change from start to finish, but the vocal and instrumental details on top of it give the feel of rising and falling, chorus and verse. We love the idea of layering percussion hits and guitar flourishes over an unchanging bassline. Feels like night time on the island.

This was us stepping out there with the production a bit. The drums are sampled from a combination of DJ Premier hip hop beats and our own drums. There's a lot of space here in the verses which is nice - having a split second of silence before the next word, or beat comes in gives the song room to breathe. Kind of an homage to laziness, it's getting harder to do nothing these days.

The first part of this song is this slow, Cocteau Twins-style dream pop flow which gets shaken up when the beat proper arrives. A sleep rhythm into an awake rhythm, but I think whether 6am is late crash or early rise depends on how you want to hear it. I wrote it as a night song and then contradicted myself with the alarm so I don't know.

This was a standout from the early demos, probably a combination of the effusive rhythm and the light, floating vocals. The biggest fear we had was overcooking it, but there's always a pressure to make things more upfront. The day we arrived at the first session to record it Sydney was overcome with this thick orange dust cloud like something from another planet - it seemed like the perfect title.

A year and a half ago we had no idea how to program a synth. The amount of knobs on this analogue machine was intimidating, but like a lot of things in the production of the album, we experimented, failed, learned and eventually understood. Broken Bones is the first successful experience we had with a synth. It's basically two arpeggios and a drone all combined in this one sound and as soon as we arrived at the sound the song had pretty much written itself. It’s the only song where I don't lift my voice, there's something about singing in the lower ranges that has this smooth tension to it, almost passive aggressive. I think this song is what you would call a grower: the less you pay attention to it the more it gets in your chest. It was a favourite throughout the process.

This was an acoustic track from very early on that was nearly forgotten about, then one day we sat down and in about five or six hours we re-did it with an entirely different feel. There's no real tricks here, I guess everyone has at one point exercised the urge to experience being away from what you know. This song refers a bit to that feeling.

After calling a song 'Conga' for nearly two years it's very hard to change the title. I guess the obviousness of the title reflects how this song caught us by surprise. We had never used congas before, we bought them on a whim and almost immediately this song happened. It became the template for the kind of music we wanted to make, it was breezy and carefree but also direct and strongly determined. It's the kind of song that when it comes up in our set I just smile and truly enjoy myself for four minutes or so.

This was thoroughly enjoyable to make, the part where we get to properly shred. It's got this kind of baggy Manchester vibe with scratchy guitars, sliding bass and an incessant looping beat. Slimeface is I guess a character that I was thinking about, perhaps someone you might know that just never gets it right, but in an uncommonly charming way. There's always something attractive about the person who has no mirror into their own life. The album version was whittled down from the original eight-minute demo complete with multiple psych breakdowns.

We were experimenting for a while with polyrhythms, mainly with melodic instruments like guitars and keyboards, and ended up with this 3-against-2 groove of tuned conga samples. Building a song on this unfamiliar ground was exciting because we couldn't really rely on typical patterns we use or things we've heard, we just put down what we felt was right without thinking too much about it. As a result I think this song was starting to push things forward a bit for us - I hate feeling restrained by common practice. Someone told me it sounds a bit like ending the album with a question mark. I have no idea what the question is?