It's 12:05pm on a Tuesday, and we're in a pub opposite a derelict hospital that Welly reckons is "truly beautiful" despite half the windows being smashed in. A member of his band is also present, although has informed us he won't say anything during the interview, rendering him a sort of 'emotional support bandmate', or a yes-man for Welly's growing cult of personality. That's right, everyone – we've once again managed to discover a contender for indie's most nonsense band.

Seeing them on stage, you'd be forgiven for thinking Welly were a band fronted by a man called Elliot. You'd be wrong, apparently. Welly is instead a riddle, a mystery, and a bloke. Turns out the rest of the people up there with him are just his band, at his beck and call to sit outside pubs in East London while he holds forth on topics as diverse as St Albans Cathedral ("Quite good, but rebuilt in 1880 so it doesn't really count") and the changing nature of Britain ("We used to make steel, now we just paint QR codes on the side of municipal buildings").

Coming bounding onto the indie scene this year, Welly has been gestating for quite a while. "As a religion, it's existed for about five years," says Welly / Elliot (Welliot?). "I really wanted to leave the suburbs, and then when I did, I missed it quite dearly because it's a very safe, cosy place to live. Two years after that, I managed to drag all my old friends from Southampton to Brighton and we've been gigging for three years since then. It's not very interesting, I'm afraid.

"I wish I had some really fucking good line about why people relate to it, but I think it's just because we all seem painfully average and approachable. We look like the people on the bus who are dead keen for a conversation, the people on the train who sit in the corner of the four seats doing the crossword on the middle of the table, asking if anyone else wants to do it with them. Also, we look so unthreatening, let's be honest. Whereas there are a lot of bands - if you look at Home Counties, for example - I reckon they can really duff you up. I reckon if we had a fight with Home Counties, we'd lose. It'd be in a totally loving way, just for a bit of clout - a bit of indie beef.

Fights are off the table then, at least until the band hit the gym. Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted by now that Welly doesn't take himself too seriously. This not only means he's comfortable singing about anything from going shopping (on the aptly named 'Shopping') to mowing lawns (on 'Deere John'), but also that he's happy to fly the flag for a bit more silliness in music more generally. A few years ago, when Friends Of The Magazine Sports Team burst onto the scene, this felt like a lonely furrow to be ploughing in a world awash with serious post-punk, but now it feels like the tides might be turning in Welly's favour.

"The first gigs I ever went to as a music fan were Sports Team gigs," says Welly. "They're going to feel very old reading that, which probably isn't fair, but supporting them does feel like a full circle moment for me. They were a massive inspiration in the way they spoke to their fans, their music, their attitude, everything [We can hear the creaking of Alex Rice's head slowly expanding from here – Ed]. I think in the past decade, you were taught to play it down, play it cool; music is supposed to be a serious business. But Sports Team turned up and said, 'No, this is amazing; I've just met Craig Charles, and I'm drinking free lager at two o'clock at Reading Festival'.

"We're trying to do something similar, and hopefully, it's working? We've got like, five Instagram fan accounts now, and they're really keeping us in corduroy. They have competitions to see how much they can stream Welly, and the winner has got 9000 minutes, which I think is 150 hours. Quite worrying stuff, really, but it's good for us, so we can't complain."

Community-building is something Welly have been doing since day one, with a YouTube footprint largely consisting of tour diaries and behind-the-scenes video content, which is often a bit... weird. Did you know that Welly wanted to be a mime in Year 4? Did you know that it takes five or six attempts for Welly to put the receiver down at a payphone while being filmed? All this and more is available for fans to peruse, make fun of, and meme to their hearts' content.

"It was always meant to feel like a peek behind the curtain," explains Welly. "It's very DIY and approachable, and I think we come across as the people in school who weren't the most popular, but also weren't complete nerds, we were just somewhere in between. We're not even trying to do anything on social media; we're just very honest in how we portray ourselves, and luckily, people identify with that. We're the suburbs in human form.

"Our music follows the same track really, appealing to the 70% of people who grew up in suburbia. Most music seems to cater to either living the dream or some incredibly inward emotional experience that you're supposed to try and relate to. I'm trying to be like Alan Bennett, John Cooper Clarke, Alex Turner, writing about what I see out the window and hoping that those experiences are shared by other people too."

If that all sounds like something you might listen to in a theatre and politely clap at the end of, fear not. Welly gigs are loud, sweaty chaos explicitly designed to make people dance and sing along. "To me, it's live first," says Welly. "If I'm spending eight quid on a pint and ten quid on a ticket, I want to have a laugh and dance around. I don't want to think about my dog dying or my relationship with my mother. At a [REDACTED] gig, that's gonna happen, but it's not for me. I want a Welly gig to feel like an indie club night, or an episode of Dick and Dom.

It's an ethos they've recently taken on the road, doing their first proper tour and taking in some less-than-regular towns along the way. Sure, they played Brighton, Liverpool, and London. But how many bands can honestly say they've performed in Kilmarnock, or Gloucester, or Lewes? And no, tribute acts and local theatre productions of 'We Will Rock You' don't count. "I think we were the first act this year to play the Gloucester Guild Hall that wasn't a panto, which is fun," grins Welly. "We were playing towns where the residents just go to whatever's on. They'll watch John Bishop, then Cats, then us. I'm not sure if they liked it, but they said it was interesting, which is something.

"I think what really hammered home that we might be playing some quite obscure places is when Scottish people started angrily demanding we play some Scottish dates, and we had two on the tour; they just hadn't heard of Kilmarnock or St Andrews. People also ask us directly to play their town, because I think we look so DIY that they assume there's nobody at the wheel, and I'm just ringing pubs up on my own so I can go and visit Carlisle. Quite selfishly, I did want to visit all of these towns. The aim is to feel like a travelling Christian music group, rolling in and spreading the gospel.

"We saw a lot of cathedrals, that's my main memory. Half the time, we'd go into them wearing our tour outfit PE kit, and the clergy would try to convert us. They'd ask if we wanted to stick around for the organ recital, which we did, but only to try and round up the attendees and take them to fill out the pub we were playing at later that day. We even offered to do 'The Whole World is in His Hands' to tempt them in – hymns get the older crowd through the door, and they're the ones who buy the vinyl and the poster.

Songs about suburban life and a tour of Britain's most far-flung towns certainly paint an image of bucolic days gone by. In an attempt to counteract this, Welly has gone on the offensive and filmed the video for his song 'Cul-de-Sac' in the most cutting-edge, modern location he could think of – a model village. "There's some really good model villages in Britain," he enthuses, eyes gleaming at the prospect of a small-scale replica of a nondescript hamlet in middle England. "Wimborne, where we filmed the video, is the best one. A lovely woman called Ruth runs it, her husband is the groundskeeper; it's incredible. Ruth stipulated her husband had to be in the video, but in return we insisted they make tiny models of us and sell them in the gift shop. I think they're doing really well - flying off the shelves.

"A model village is a very English thing, isn't it. Your first time at a model village is like your first kiss: it's an intense, emotional experience. Imagine going to one in the 1970s, before the internet was a thing. It'd be incredible. The café at Wimborne sells spuds, too, which is nice.

All in all, it's been a rollercoaster year for Welly, and that's without even touching on how his mum thinks 'Deere John' is about her and Welly's stepdad ("Mum, I promise you it isn't about Nick – everyone cuts their grass, not just him.") He also had quite a lot to say about Elton John which we've been forced to excise in case any of it was libellous. But what's next for Welly and his ragtag band of compatriots?

"There's the gig on the moon," he begins, counting off on his fingers. "We're going to take the London Community Gospel Choir up there in Richard Branson's yacht. Then, of course, we have the gig at the centre of the Earth, which will be a sweaty one. Most importantly, though, we have the Dork Hype List tour [Correct answer – Ed], which will be very good indeed.

"We've also got a new single out, which isn't out now but will be out when the magazine is out, so is, to all intents and purposes, out. It's a Darwinian evolution of our sound. If 'Deere John' was the monkey, 'Big in the Suburbs' is Elton John chewing Nordic Spirit – it's the complete modern metro man. It's also the menu for the album, which is coming out on 21st March, and is also called 'Big in the Suburbs'. It tells all the stories of what's to come and draws a map of the album as a whole. I had to cut it in half for the radio edit, which I hated every second of and felt like sacrilege.

A Dork tour and a debut album – all sounds very grown up, doesn't it? Especially if you ignore the first two fictitious gigs in outer space and the middle of the planet. Any fears that Welly might be about to shed his cocoon of nonsense and become a self-serious rockstar butterfly can be safely quashed, though. "The world is in such a sorry state that I think indie music owes it not only to itself but to the fans to have a laugh and poke fun at itself," he says. "It's a ridiculous hobby, and as Geordie Greep said in an interview the other day, if you're doing it for a job, it's an awful, awful job to have. The hours are terrible, the pay is terrible, the travel is terrible. You should only, only, only be doing this if you're having a laugh, and that's what we try and do.

"We all work. Matt works at a bar. Jacob's a civil servant. Hannah works at a record shop, and me and Joe flog veg. We're not doing this as some elite side hustle, like we're selling protein powder. We can only do this because we really love it. And with the community we've got, and all our lovely, lovely fans, it's worth it. There's clearly a market to have a laugh with it, so that's what I'm trying to do – that's Welly." ■