The band re-examined all the material they had in reserve to see if they could piece together something new, and found they had a lot to play with. As Will points out, recent single ‘Midnight’ was written on the same day as album highlight ‘Thorns of Love’, but they still sound different. “It was always naturally going to be that way,” he considers, “because these were songs written to originally get to somewhere. They were about the journey of the song. For example, the song ‘One Of Us’ I’m really proud of, but it’s one of the ones I regret not putting on the record itself. I was at a grand piano, and Ian [Miles] was on electric guitar, and we just wrote this bit and made that chorus really high and difficult to sing. Then we’re like, okay, cool, let’s fuck around with this. Let’s try and roughhouse something with samples to try and do this.

Turning his attention to the title, Will reveals that ‘American Noir’ was originally meant for the album. “We met this really eccentric guy who had worked with Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears and stuff. He was really weird, and I loved him. I told him the story of this record that we wanted to make, but we hadn’t really started working on it at that point, and he was like, okay, what’s it called? I was like, I don’t really know. I imagined it like a noir film, but it’s based in America, and he was like, ‘American Noir’!

Will also saw this EP as an opportunity for bandmate Hannah Greenwood to shine. “I went into a cocoon of trying to write songs for Hannah because we wrote ‘Crickets’ on ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’ for Hannah, and she was really reluctant at first to step up, and when she did, she was just fantastic. She’s so good. She’s such a brilliant talent; you just can’t believe it when you see her perform.

As for how Will feels about ‘Sex, Death, and the Infinite Void’ a year on, he says: “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s the best thing I’ve been involved in, by a long shot. I’m really, really proud of that record. It’s funny because the thing is, as creative people, we critique everything we do to ridiculous degrees. Usually, you look back on it a year ago and think fucking hell, that’s awful!

“I’m just so proud of it. It’s such a good album. I can remember every moment, where and when we were doing it, how I had to bend everything to fit into a narrative all the time, alongside all the tragedies in real life, like speaking to Ian when he was in a psychiatric hospital in the UK about what was going on with him and the conspiracy theory he was believing in, while I was in LA in an Uber. It’s all these different minutiae that go into this really textured piece, and then you listen to it, it’s the story of Roe and Annabelle and Calvary Falls, and it’s got the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra on it!

“It’s crazy how this stupid little punk band we started in Ian’s mum house has become this. I’m really proud of it. If I was a kid and that came out, I would really really enjoy it! What I’m trying to say is, I feel like I haven’t picked it apart, and I don’t hate it as much as I hate some of the other things I’ve done. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not sure. You get what I mean, though. It’s sometimes difficult to love stuff that you’ve done, but this is something that I’m very close to, and I feel is an accomplishment over the adversity in our lives.”