SOLD OUT

Its distinctive Pink Floyd-esque cover underlines the more epic status of The Maccabees’ third album Given To The Wild.

Depicting a sculpture by artist Andy Goldsworthy, the image has all the mystery and impact of Storm Thorgerson’s classic designs for the likes of Wish You Were Here or The Division Bell.

And, as guitarist Felix White says, the music within is certainly a long way from the headline of The Argus’s first review of the band at the Union back in 2005.

“The Argus was the first newspaper or magazine to write about The Maccabees,” he says, revealing he still has the clipping.

“It was a big picture of the gig, with the headline ‘Hedonistic punksters’. It’s far removed from that these days...”

Back in those days the band were the toast of Brighton, having moved to the city to record their debut album Colour It In, and its 2009 follow-up Wall Of Arms.

The band’s spiky indie-rock sound, overlaid by Orlando Week’s distinctive vocals, was infectious and so popular in the city it even sparked a notorious “riot” at Concorde 2 before their debut album’s release.

In the past two years the six-piece has moved back to London, where they started the process of writing their third album, which has embraced a much fuller, orchestrated and epic sound.

“We didn’t want to make a bigger sound,” admits White. “We had just got frustrated with being in the rehearsal room – we were finding that way of writing a bit limited.”

Instead the band took ideas home and worked on them individually, sending tracks back and forth and adding layers to each other’s work.

“It does sound bigger than anything we’ve done before,” says White.

“The result is down to the process, we didn’t have a board meeting at the start of it all saying this is how we wanted it to be.

“We had always tried to make it as democratic as possible. It’s ended up being incredibly collaborative.”

It also meant the band wasn’t rooted to their instruments.

“I was programming drums, while Sam [Doyle] our drummer was writing piano lines,” says White. “Everyone was thinking in that different headspace which has been really beneficial.”

Keeping with that classic album feel, the band also decamped to the remote Rockfield Studios in the Wye Valley for some of the recording sessions, with producers Tim Goldsworthy and Bruno Ellingham in tow.

“We were going to do it at home, whether we were in Brighton or London,” says White. “But it made sense to go into the country for a month, with no phone reception, where we couldn’t do anything but make a record.”

It has clearly worked. The album is a big step forward from Wall Of Arms, and on release in January earned their highest peak position of number four in the album charts.

Now the challenge facing the band is making it work on stage.

“When we made the record we decided we weren’t going to hold anything back,” says White.

“Before, we couldn’t layer 20 guitars on a song because we couldn’t play it live. We didn’t want to give ourselves boundaries this time. It’s a whole new challenge to present it live.

“Some of the songs we never played live together, they were just recorded, so it has been a real learning experience. There’s a couple we’re still trying to work out – Ayla, the third song on the album, is difficult because there is so much production, the song lives in that world so much it feels like we aren’t doing it justice if we don’t get it right.”

The change in style doesn’t mean the old songs have been forgotten about, with White saying the band still enjoys playing fanfavourites suchas X-Ray and First Love. “It feels like those songs have aged really well, it’s nice to sprinkle them into the set.

“Maccabees gigs have a bit more atmosphere to them now, it’s not hell-for-leather the whole way through. The people who come to our gigs have always been good enough to let us move the right way.

“We are always saying the next album isn’t going to sound like this one. It’s not like, ‘This is The Maccabees and this is what we sound like forever’. With this we thought about what it would be like for somebody who goes home and puts the album on in their living room, or on their headphones.”

The promotional material for the album also hints at directions the band would like to explore, including an online atmospheric video soundtracked by the band.

“We’ve been talking about doing a whole soundtrack,” he says. “We would love to do more stuff like that – this record sounds almost cinematic. I love watching films like O Lucky Man, which has Alan Price doing the soundtrack.”

As for a follow-up album, White admits he’s having problems selling it to the rest of the band.

“We had two years of hard work getting this record together,” he says. “Now we can enjoy being a band for the next year or two.

“I was saying to the boys that the next album should be a double, but everyone was saying, ‘Please shut up – we’ve only just finished this one’.

“I’m not going to do any more poking for a while otherwise it’s going to have the opposite effect...”