IF anyone had told Fear Of Men’s Jess Weiss she was to spend five months travelling with eight other people in a van she would have politely declined.

“I’ve been home for about a week since March,” says the Brighton-based singer and guitarist, who launched Fear Of Men in 2011 with fellow art student guitarist Daniel Falvey after meeting at an exhibition.

“My whole perspective on life and how much I could be around other people has changed. Before I think I would have said my mental health would be out of the window. It’s great to surprise yourself – my perspective on life is a little different.”

For a band whose first single Ritual Confession featured the line “hell is other people though” it suggests the follow-up April’s fiercely introspective debut Loom could be quite a departure.

Weiss has already started work on the next release, demoing songs “in a cottage in the middle of nowhere”. She hopes the album will be recorded by the end of the year.

Loom – which is dominated by chiming Postcard-era indie guitars, overlaid by Weiss’s haunting but pure vocals – has been picking up traction in the US following a tour supporting The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart.

When she speaks to The Guide Weiss is in Cambridge, having performed keyboards and vocals with Kip Berman’s outfit after the two bands bonded on the road.

They came together through chance after a wayward email.

“A year or two ago our label boss in New York was trying to send one of our tracks to a publisher called Kip to see if he wanted to work with us,” says Weiss. “He accidentally sent it to Kip Berman who tweeted about our track before it was even released! We became friends and hung out in New York and London.

“Kip has an encyclopaedic knowledge of every 1980s and 1990s band – I don’t know as much about music as Kip does, but we definitely have a common sensibility of pop songwriting and not wanting to over-complicate things.”

Loom was the product of intense late-night sessions between Weiss, Falvey and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Mike Miles in an underground studio, following a series of singles and cassette tapes – collected on the release Early Fragments.

“We knew we wanted the album to have a narrative arc,” says Weiss. “We wanted different lights and shade over the whole record.”

Weiss penned the basic songs, before taking them to her bandmates, who spent their nights working on the album and their days holding down regular jobs.

“We spent so much time together,” says Weiss. “If it had just been me on my own it would have sounded nothing like the record.

“The album was a very intense time – we would come to the studio at 6pm and work through to 3am or 4am, until the sun came up. We would go to work the next morning after a couple of hours sleep, and we were doing that over a series of months. It can add a lot of tension to a situation but we got on really well. We had a great time playing around with the songs – it bonded us in a way that is quite exciting – we feel like family members.”

She admits it will be hard for a bassist to break into what she describes as that ecosystem – although doesn’t rule it out for the future.

“Dan is incredibly perfectionist, whereas I will like the general feel of how I want something to be,” she says. “That perfectionism is a wonderful quality that pushes us forward.”

With Weiss and Falvey’s art school background it’s no surprise they also take control over the visual aspects of the band – as Weiss puts it “this is basically our life”.

Their control extends from directing videos to shooting the album cover in Hove’s Regency Town House.

“I had been an intern there researching the architecture,” says Weiss, who broke model Miles’s nose when taking the plastercast off his face for the album image.

“The town house let us in there for an hour to do the shoot – it was really stressful, and only the last photo came out!

“With the album it’s really gratifying to see that people either feel the same way I do or read something into my lyrics that means something to them.

“It’s really wonderful to go to places like Albuquerque and hearing someone say they loved their record because a song associated with their own personal story.”