Post-rock sonic explorers  This Will Destroy You found themselves in a dark place before recording their second studio album Tunnel Blanket.

Bass player Raymond Brown had departed shortly after the release of S/T and, after a long and gruelling tour, drummer Andrew Miller followed him out of the door.

After employing a glut of session players, the band invited Donovan Jones to join them as a long-term replacement on bass. Guitarists Christopher Royal King and Jeremy Galindo then brought in Alex Bhore – who’d taken This Will Destroy You on the road with his old band The New Frontiers – to drive along those epic, post-rock half-time drums.

After the gloomy ambience of Tunnel Blanket, Bhore says the group’s upcoming third studio album reflects a new optimism for the epic instrumentalists.

“It’s got some of the textual, ambient, dark stuff on it, but there is more melody and we approached it in a new way.

“We wanted to make it more rhythmic, more melodic. On Another Language we were in a dark place. This felt more honest, more in tune to what we were experiencing at the time. It has positive melodies.”

This Will Destroy You’s Texan roots have brought comparisons to Explosions In The Sky. But many fans prefer to put the band in a bracket with the Icelandic legends Sigur Rós.

This Will Destroy You’s debut EP, Young Mountain, certainly compares to the men from Reykjavik’s complex fusion of emotion.

Rock Sound Magazine even named the recording, which was originally a six-song demo, its Album Of The Year in 2006.

Sigur Rós singer Jonsi often uses his voice as an extra instrumental layer. But This Will Destroy You avoid vocals all together, other than as a sampled or looped clip in a background sound.

“It makes any box for us to write in bigger and allows us to write without vocals as the focal point,” explains Bhore. “John Congleton our producer is great. He can pull out a focal point we’d never have thought of and put it in the front of the mix and it always works.”

This Will Destroy You The Haunt, Pool Valley, Brighton, Thursday, September 4