For a long time Brian Molko embraced the role of rock’s libertine prince, enjoying fame as much for a decadent, pleasure-seeking lifestyle as for the body of work it informed.

Today, you suspect that downtime is a rare commodity for the Placebo singer who, in addition to taking on the responsibilities of parenthood (his first son, Cody, will turn four this October), is right now slogging away on the campaign trail to promote epic new album Battle For The Sun, the follow-up to 2006’s Meds.

When rare leisure time does arise these days one thing he likes to do “for fun” is to “try and write pop songs with a couple friends. But with our backgrounds they don’t come out incredibly like pop. They don’t sound like Lady Gaga”.

One ‘pop’ experiment unexpectedly made it on to the new record, under the title of ‘Ashtray Heart’, a phrase Placebo triviaheads will no doubt recognise as the rumoured original name of the group itself. Molko however is quick to deny that he has come this far only to make a knowing nod back to Placebo pre-history. “That’s a bit of a red herring”, he smiles, declaring “I’d actually like to punch the person who put that on the internet. I think maybe I did a gig in a pub in Deptford in ’93 or something with [former drummer] Steve Hewitt on bongos, where we may have called ourselves Ashtray Heart the once”.

Red herring aside, those early days seem very distant on Battle For The Sun. Molko affirms that his days of finding inspiration on the seedier since of life are well and truly behind him. Instead the new record was “heavily influenced by becoming a parent, when a lot of things in [his] lifestyle changed”. He elaborates only to say that, “once you’re less enthusiastically ploughing yourself full of toxins you’re not just dealing with drug paranoia anymore, you’re actually dealing with life - and on life’s terms. Just by the nature of it you end up having a more positive, or at least a more human and realistic outlook. Your problems and conflicts become less self-created and you’re more within society, I suppose, rather than creating all this torment inside of yourself. And that makes this a much broader record”.

Battle For The Sun is indisputably broad, both in terms of sonics and themes. Before we assess exactly what has changed though it seems worth exploring further precisely why Placebo have chosen this moment, some fifteen years into their career, to begin learning new tricks. Fatherhood, it emerges, is but one of many new experiences Molko owes his newfound “positive” outlook to, as he recounts how all that he and the band once were needed to be razed to the foundations before what he refers to as “Placebo – mark three”, could be built.

A year ago Placebo – at its core Molko and bassist Stefan Olsdal – were without either a drummer or a record deal. With the group’s contract to Virgin having expired at the release of Meds, Battle For The Sun was a self-financed recording in the first place, later licensed for release in individual territories. By Molko’s estimations around two thirds of the record was completed as a two piece, after a world tour in support of Meds witnessed “personal relationships in the band breaking down… and us becoming unhappy and self-conscious”, events which culminated in the departure of long-standing drummer Steve Hewitt.

His replacement, Steve Forrest, arrived in mid-2008, announced by a video resumé. The heavily inked sticksman proclaimed, “I like drums, I like tattoos, and I like to live a happy life”. Molko recalls: “I thought ‘I like this boy!’” He feels the twenty-two-year-old’s presence has lent “a refreshingly youthful exuberance to the whole thing. That fed into this optimism that Stefan and I had found again, all of a sudden we felt like shackles has been lifted off of us. In front of us we had no label, no nothing. It felt like a blank canvas and we didn’t feel at all afraid of that freedom. It was like, ‘okay, let’s do this now, let’s make this enormous record we’ve probably been trying to make for a while, but that so many reasons – personal relationships within the band, lifestyle choices – have stopped us from making in the past’”

Enormous is certainly not too great a word for what Molko has described as being Placebo’s most thematically unified release. It’s a turn of phrase which almost hints ominously at a ‘concept’ record, and certainly at lyrical ambitions that only lashings of strings, brass and a five-and-a-half minute download-only lead single in the title track, could be grand enough to support. ‘Speak In Tongues’, a track which Molko has picked out as a favourite, is two songs in one… “it starts off as cocktail hour in the mental hospital and then sort of morphs through this choral bridge into this enormous stadium track that has this real positive message of ‘we can build a new tomorrow’”.

That particular lyric feels almost representative of the entire album’s theme of positive change, we suggest.

“Absolutely”, Molko nods. “The way that we interact socially and romantically with each other is very interesting to me… it’s always a big part of my song writing. But the theme, if there is something running through [this record], is this theme of change – and that change doesn’t just happen. You have to make choices and you have to fight for them. It’s all in the name of the record. You can’t just wake up one day and say ‘I want my life to change so therefore it’s changed’. Sometimes you have to fight for it. I guess the big conflict I’ve always dealt with through the song writing has changed, in that it’s less a conflict with one’s own self - it’s more reactive to the outside world”.

It’s not just lyrical darkness that is being cast out on Battle For The Sun. The bombastic brass sounds are equally likely to throw Placebo’s core fanbase on first listen, although paradoxically a little of Molko’s former taste for twisted entertainment emerges again when he admits that the temptation to incorporate these new elements stemmed partially from “the cheeky, mischievous feeling of ‘oh yeah, this is gonna really freak out the goths!’” He goes on, cackling, “They’re gonna be crying into their panstick going ‘Oh no! What’s become of my favourite band? I can’t believe they’re using trombones! And flutes!’ There’s a kind of mischievous joy that comes from that.

"Of course, you want them to take it for what it is and hopefully break down some musical prejudices by doing that. For us it was like ‘Why not? We haven’t done this before, it works in this song…’ and you mustn’t shy away that”, he reasons. “Finding ourselves in this situation of great freedom – no label, no drummer, no nothing – we had a chance to write our own future in way and we just embraced it, gave it a massive bear hug!”