Something Soft is your first album since becoming a trio. How do you feel the lineup change has affected the dynamic of the band?

Sean: It's a different dynamic without Róisín [Nic Ghearailt, former vocalist] and Zoë [Greenway]. It did take time to strike a balance of input and responsibility between the three of us without those two prominent creative voices. Having said that, our approach remains largely the same.

Constance: It was a bit of a role change for me now singing on the record. I was quite nervous about it, but I knew it was something I wanted to do so I figured I may as well try.

You recorded the album at Alifionn Studio in Dublin with Sarah Deegan on bass and your former bassist Zoë Greenway contributed bass and vocals on certain tracks. Like with all of your releases, Jamie, you recorded, mixed, mastered, and produced it. What was the recording process like? Jamie, what goes into putting a M(h)aol album together?

Jamie: For this album, we got to put in a considerable amount more work in the actual writing of the music than we did for the previous album. That let us get much more specific about the sounds and the parts. That was the first thing, to figure out what the music is supposed to sound like in the playing of it.

I like to record us live for the most part as you get the occasional little structural or musical anomaly and any sort of tempo variations. I spent about a half day setting up drums, amps and mics, did a few test recordings and fine-tuned the setup from there. We actually did all the tracks with Zoë in a separate session a few months before “Pursuit” came out, but the setup was basically the same for the rest of the album.

“Clementine” features vocals from Dara Kiely of Gilla Band. How did this collaboration come about?

Jamie: I've been friends with Dara since a couple of weeks before secondary school. We met in a rugby camp as two of the three or four weirdo musicians who should not be playing rugby. As far as I recall, Dara actually continued playing until well into our final few years of school.

Connie had asked him years ago when the song was originally written to collaborate on it, which he did, and when we decided to record and release the song for real he was keen to be involved. I've recorded him a few times before with Gilla Band and a few other bits so in terms of that end of it it wasn't strange at all. I bought him some cans of Guinness and we shouted our little heads off together.

Constance: I believe I was at a party with him and said, “Dara I started a band, you’ll sing on a song” and he did, like the angel that he is.

The cover of the album shows a cat looking out a huge window. What does this photo mean to you?

Jamie: I identify strongly with cats. I think I identify most with a cat catching a sunbeam. This cat in particular was looking out of its first-floor apartment window down onto a courtyard in Paris last April. It was a cold April so this was maybe the cat's first glimpse of springtime really coming on, the breaking of the cold grey winter. I like the parallel that could be drawn between the album title and the cat. They are soft in certain ways but at the same time have teeth and claws.

The album takes its name from a line in “Snare”. Why did you decide to name the album after this lyric in particular?

Sean: Other than it being nicely alliterative, it ties into the expectations and limitations of what is expected of certain people or certain types of music.

How would you describe your songwriting process?

Sean: We almost always write together in the same room. In some cases, there might be something that someone has brought either lyrically or musically but it's normally just a process of seeing how different sounds and pieces interact with each other and trying to follow ideas intuitively.

Thankfully, Jamie is quite good at translating the direction we feel something should go into actual musical language and ideas. For the tracks with Sarah on this album, the 3 of us generally had hashed out the structure of the songs with ideas for what the 2nd bass might do before Sarah joined to contribute to wiring those parts.

Did you have a song that was most cathartic to write?

Jamie: The writing of “Coda” was an exercise in catharsis for myself and Zoë. We had been chronically petrified of using our voices and being heard and we used the shouting on that as a way to try and find a level of comfort within ourselves as we knew we were all going to have to take on doing vocals.

Constance: I found writing “Pursuit” to be really cathartic because it was the first one we did with me on vocals and I had been worried about stepping into that role. To be able to scream behind a drumkit will almost always be cathartic, I think.

“E8/N16” takes its name from two postal codes in London and the lyrics are made up of people’s names. What’s the story behind this song?

Constance: That song is a list of generic men’s names I saw on Hinge in those two postcodes. The rest of the profiles involved a lot of photos of men bouldering and asking for travel tips to Japan.

On “1-800-Call-Me-Back” you talk about getting ghosted and Constance, you’ve said that ghosting should be a “criminal offense for anyone over 25”. What can be done to exorcise these ghosts?

Constance: I think we need to take their phones away so they don’t even have the opportunity to ghost. They should go back to living in the ‘90s.

“Vin Diesel” has a distorted spoken word part near the end. What is being said during that part?

Jamie: This part is actually where the track gets its title. I had initially joked about this being about where Vin Diesel sourced his wardrobe for Fast and Furious films. The day we were writing this song just so happened to be a day when Vin Diesel had actually posted on Facebook this really sweet, heartfelt message about wrapping up the shooting of the new Fast film. This is what is actually being read out under the cacophony. It's all about how lucky he is to be working with such a great team and thanking his family and daughters and it ends with, “As my father always said, stay human”.

Both the song and video for “I Miss My Dog” pay tribute to pets who are no longer on this mortal coil. Do you have any memories of your pets that you’d like to share?

Jamie: I've had quite a few pets by this point. Each one does have a few stories. First, we had a hamster called Nibbles. One night he got out of his cage and disappeared under my parents’ watch. They insisted that he had a hard day and needed to spend a few days in bed. He eventually returned, but not before my parents had replaced him. The replacement was then renamed Escher and pawned off on the neighbours only to discover that the replacement was a girl and a heavily pregnant one at that… We did years later adopt a guinea pig from those same neighbours who similarly ended up having to be renamed from Nigel to Nigella.

Constance: “I Miss My Dog” is about my dog Poppy, who passed away almost a year ago. She was perfect. Definitely not actually perfect, but perfect anyway. My family and I miss her a lot. I keep expecting her to be in the living room even though it’s been 11 months since she died.

The video for “DM:AM” captures the vibe of the song perfectly. How did the idea for this video come about? What was filming it like?

Jamie: The filming was really strange actually. I had a constant feeling of communal effort even with hundreds or thousands of miles between us.

Constance: I watched a movie called Carnival of Souls and the use of black and white and panning in that film inspired me a lot. Col Lee, the DOP, is someone I’ve worked with a bunch of times and they have such a wonderful can-do attitude that is really needed with this band because everything is done on the fly. I have some very kind friends who agreed to be in it even though it was really cold that day.

You’ll be touring Ireland with Cola and Junk Drawer this month and will be touring the UK in September. What are you looking forward to the most about these shows?

Sean: Obviously, it'll be a treat to see Cola and Junk Drawer play every night. We'll also get the chance to return to some places we haven't been in a while and a bunch of places we've never played before.

Jamie: Aside from that, the Irish tour is going to be great fun just because of the novelty of doing an Irish tour. It's not something anyone really does these days. For the September runs, I'm working away behind the scenes trying to get everything in place to be able to put on a much more bespoke stage show for the first time. We’ll see how that all goes as at the moment there's a question about van insurance…

Which part of Something Soft are you proudest of?

Jamie: I couldn't say one part. It's maybe just the overarching collaborative aspect of it. From the songs coming together, the recordings, the artwork, and videos…

Constance: The fact that the album exists.