It’s a rare band that can consider the commercial high-point of their career to be a record opening with the lines “my girlfriend says that I need help / my boyfriend says I’d be better off dead / I’m gonna get drunk / come round and fuck you up”.

But so it is that Therapy?’s number five charting fourth album Troublegum begins, and with it the better part of a near 20-year story that has only gotten progressively more strange. Although they peaked early in terms of sales, the cult Irish rockers were artistically still far from their most confrontational at the time they recorded those lines.

Seven ever more challenging albums lead us to 2009’s Crooked Timber (the title of which is derived from Immanuel Kant’s statement that “from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”), while musical inspiration comes from a developing interest in “rhythm over melody”, and growing passions for dubstep and techno - influences that the trio sought to represent without deviating from their traditionally guitar-led arrangements. All considered, it seems fair to suggest that scoring a chart position is not a primary objective at this point in their career.

“It may sound cheesy, but we did write this album for the three of us”, confirms Neil Cooper, drummer and, next to vocalist / guitarist Andy Cairns and bassist Michael McKeegan who together founded the band in 1989, the relative newcomer, joining in 2002. “I think the great thing about the fanbase is that they’re open to what we do,” he continues, “and we feel very lucky, because with this record the three of us were able to walk away very happy with how it sounds. I think the three of us can say, hand on heart, that every instrument, Andy’s vocals, the lyrics, they all sound exactly as they should”.

Misleadingly, this comment may suggest that Therapy? began work on Crooked Timber with a grand plan for how it ‘should’ sound, while the reality, as Cooper qualifies, is that the record acquired it’s unique identity through being written “bottom up… we just jammed around stuff, recorded loads of bits and pieces and listening back later would go ‘that sounds really great, let’s go with that’. It was getting into the groove of it, rather than it being very riff based and built around that”.

The foundations of this approach, which Cooper notes was as fresh for the band as the results it yielded will sound to listeners, had been laid during a tour of Germany in early 2008, when Therapy? began “drawing out a few songs and just jamming around things live. We were listening to a lot of these German bands like Can; bands that draw stuff out and let things breathe a little bit,” Cooper remembers, perhaps offering an insight into the origins of Crooked Timber’s own 10 minute epic The Magic Mountain, which takes its title from a work by the German novelist Thomas Mann.

Although it’s doubtful the record would have taken quite the strange shape it did without the experiences gained on that German tour, live performance had no place in the months spent making it.

The band took almost a year off from the road as they settled into a period of writing and recording every bit as intense and involved as the fruits it ultimately bore. Partly Cooper says “it was a really conscious decision to put the brakes on”, in order to allow the material that ‘breathing space’, but equally such a method was born of necessity, as he points out: “I’m in Derby, Andy’s down in Cambridge and Mike still lives over in Belfast. We don’t have the luxury of getting together every week and when we do get together it’s for a reason. I would say we do sometimes work best when our backs are against the wall. Rehearsing in the centre of London there are so many distractions, and so often we will kind of take ourselves away and almost lock ourselves away to do it”.

The fourth key figure in the isolated Newcastle recording sessions which Cooper describes was producer Andy Gill. Perhaps best known for his part in Gang Of Four, Gill was on this occasion charged with teasing out the individual nuances of ten tracks which, in their diverse form as much the common lyrical threads drawing from Cairns’ long fascination with mankind’s quirks, stand to represent the human irregularities implied by the album’s title.

“We still all get off on hearing new stuff and so we will go ‘let’s try this’ or ‘let’s try that’, and between the three of us there is no qualm if someone goes ‘you know what, that’s crap!’,” laughs Cooper, explaining just what the producer had signed up for, as he continues to say that “what this does mean is that someone can come in and say ‘I’m listening to this great dubstep track and it’s inspired me to play a riff like this – what do you think?’ and it won’t get an immediate response of ‘what are you talking about, we can’t be influenced by that!’. Instead, it’s ‘let’s try it and see what happens’. And Andy got it immediately, he knew where we were coming from,” Cooper says, clearly impressed.

In support of this statement he goes on to report how, at the producer’s suggestion, the unconventional musical ideas were captured via some suitably “unusual ways of recording… from my end, drum-wise, he had me recording the drums in a completely bizarre way that I’d never done before. We recorded the full album of drums and then we did the cymbals over the top of that. And with Andy [Cairns]’s guitar sounds, they’re not your stock Gibson plugged into a Marshall sounds. So it was all a very strange way of recording, but it worked!”.

After spending the best part of 12 months away from the stage, Cooper admits that the summer’s sporadic festival and European dates constituted a vital adjustment period. “When we’re in the studio we’re really happy, but you have to get into that frame of mind, and obviously when you take it out live it’s another frame of mind,” he says. In good time for November’s headlining UK run they appear to be well and truly back in their comfort zone live, as Cooper tells that they’ve even approached the epic Magic Mountain on recent dates. “It started off as a jam in the studio, so now live we can do whatever we want with it, which is kind of what it was meant to be in the first place”, he says, promising that “it’s actually going down far better than a lot of people thought it would”.

Therapy? play The Garage on 20 November.