Ask most rappers about their live shows, and you’ll hear words like ‘energy’, ‘passion’ and ‘crowd interaction’ thrown around in various endlessly-repeated combinations. Not Slug. When asked about how he and his Atmosphere partner Ant rock live, here’s what he says:

“There are songs I hate performing. A lot of these songs are tied to moments of time in my life… It’s kind of hard sometimes to represent that time if I’m not feeling like that. It feels contrived to go up and do a song like ‘Fuck You Lucy’, where I don’t have that kind of anger in me right now. How am I supposed to pull off that song and be honest about it?” Slug (Sean Daley) is a difficult and idiosyncratic man to interview. He has made a career out of being brutally honest and self-critical on the mic.

As Atmosphere, he and his producer Ant (Anthony Davis) have built a ten year-plus career on storytelling songs that don’t make you feel good. That’s six albums, four EPs, multiple promo CDs, compilations and tours. You don’t get to come out of Minneapolis as an indie hip-hop act and hang around for that long without a hook. Some people have cruelly labelled it emo-rap; it’s just Slug making songs about being Slug. It found an audience and has made for some incredible music over the past few years - even if Slug still doesn’t think his job is always to get the party live.

“The audience has an energy. You don’t have to get it going. You just have to show them that you’re there with them on the same page.” He pauses for a second. “It’s funny when rappers consider that they have this magical power that turns the crowd into a party. Give me a fucking break! These people came because they wanted to party. You’re not some magician that’s just making it happen.”

It’s too early to call the album of 2008, but Atmosphere certainly get props for the best album title of the year, possibly the best ever. It’s called When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold. Where previous Atmosphere records like Seven’s Travels focussed on synth-based production, Ant gets his bluegrass on for this one, with considered, almost shy rust-belt grooves that owe more to live instrumentation than conventional hip-hop breaks.

But, as in real life, Ant’s just the facilitator. It is Slug who, on Lemons, finally turns his bleak imagination away from himself and onto the characters that make up his world: a despondent waitress working a dead-end job, a young father trying to make ends meet, a little girl sitting in the back of her dad’s ride while he blasts gangsta rap out the window.

The reason for the change of approach in the writing is because of something which Slug thinks he should have seen coming: Sean Daley started to become the person he was rapping about; the hard-living, booze-knocking, inward-looking Slug the MC became a reality. He says: “I started noticing how kids who were getting into my music were ideally painting me as being autobiographical. They weren’t allowing my stories to just be narratives told in the first person.

I kind of got sick of everybody thinking that I’m the guy from the stories; especially with today’s keep-it-real mentality, it’s like we don’t allow room for rappers to just tell stories with a point or a moral.” It was a rock star implosion of catastrophic proportions that prompted this, at least in part.

Around the summer of 04-05, Slug says, he was working through a haze of alcohol and becoming a caricature of himself. He contracted alopecia, a disease which caused his hair to fall out. “When that happened,” he says, “Ant saw that too and he said, you know what, it’s time for us to get more serious. Try to do something more productive than get girls to want to blow me.” The hair grew back. As did the drive and the resolve for Slug and Ant to keep writing and recording. Ah, Ant. To say that the poker-faced producer doesn’t say much is a bit like calling Jimi Hendrix slightly raunchy. Ant has for years been comfortable with Slug being the public face of the group, being content to make music, almost never do interviews and, until recently, not even go out on tour.

Slug laughs when questioned about how he finally managed to drag his friend out on the road with him. “(Ant) didn’t want anything to do with it. He just wanted to make music. He didn’t know it could be so much fun. He loves it. He tries to act like he doesn’t but he does, he loves it.”

Being around for so long lets Atmosphere do certain things that other, less established acts might have trouble doing. The limited edition of Lemons came with an illustrated storybook, written by Slug, which detailed some of the stories on the album. They refused to send out press copies, too.

“The press copies end up on the internet two months before the record comes out, and it kills the momentum,” Slug says. “I used to be able to tour with new music and some people would be hearing it for the first time at the shows. I wanted to recapture that. I wanted to recapture what it was like for a fan to have to wait until Tuesday.” And on reportedly leaving gold-painted lemons stashed in journalists’ bags at listening sessions? “I’m not gonna admit to that. I can’t remember.”

Hack-baiting aside, it is certainly their highest-selling album, debuting at No.5 on the Billboard 200 and making their label Rhymesayers very happy indeed – not that Slug and Ant pay much attention to chart position. Slug in particular is much more focussed on his live show right now: and even if he’s decided not to drop certain songs, that honest, earnest, everyman groove will still be in effect.

“No matter what,” he says, “all I hope is that at the end of the day it connects with the audience. That’s all I’ve ever really hoped for.”