Two Door Cinema Club talk ahead of Birmingham show - interview

Every single date of their UK tour has sold out. From Birmingham to Cambridge, from Manchester to Newcastle, from Glasgow to London. Promoters have plastered big, red SOLD OUT stickers over every last poster.

The tour kicks off in Birmingham on Tuesday and it's little wonder fans are so enthused. The band's autumn single, Are We Ready?, reintroduced them to the TDCC faithful while their subsequent album, Gameshow, returned them to the Top 10, four years after their previous album, Beacon, went to No2.

The Irish indie rockers, who'll be playing the UK's biggest festivals this summer, were glad to be back.

Are We Ready? perfectly showed frontman Alex Trimble's growth as a songwriter and lyricist, eloquently encapsulating the so-called information generation's uncomfortable relationship with elements of modern life and the intensifying societal pressure to engage with the brain-frying online whirlpool.

"While I was writing this single I discovered this term weltschmertz, the German word for being at odds with the world around you," Alex says. "The fact it was a fully coined term and related to so many people that have existed and do exist made me feel it was okay to not exist on the same level as everyone else, it was okay to be comfortable doing your own thing.

"Are We Ready? was me…not attacking the world around me but outlining why I don't really get it and why I don't fit in with it."

Challenging themselves to indulge in a wide and varied range of styles and influences stretching way beyond the traditional Two Door sound they took in Prince, Chic, krautrock, neo soul and modernist pop. Gameshow is by far Two Door Cinema Club's most enthralling record yet, albeit one full of the uncertainties of finding yourself and your place in the world.

Alex added: "We're not embracing the pop that's going on now in a melodic or structural sense. The two biggest influences for me were Prince and Bowie – both total pioneers who straddled that line between out-there pop and avant garde craziness."

Having spent the whole of their adult lives in each others' pockets on a gruelling 'record-tour-promote' treadmill, the three school friends from Bangor, Northern Ireland took a self-imposed break from band life.

Dispersing to their homes around the world – Portland for Alex, Los Angeles for Kevin and London for Sam – the band initially began to exchange thoughts and ideas that had excited them during their break over email.

Sketches of tracks and ideas being openly discussed, pulled apart and reassembled from three corners of the world, and with the air cleared, the band reconvened in LA with renowned producer Jacknife Lee (R.E.M., U2, Bloc Party) to get in a room together and record the album.

Re-energised, Gameshow is the sound of a band back in their stride, with a creative fire in their loins and a whole new centred sense of purpose.

By Andy Richardson