Even the most adventurous alchemists return to their favoured base elements in the pursuit of maximum potency. So it was that The Phantom Band – those wilfully mercurial outriders who changed their name repeatedly, disbanded and reformed to wrong-foot potential followers before firing out two diverse albums of singular brilliance in Checkmate Savage (2009) and The Wants (2011) – reached album number three seeking a return to the first principles of performance that brought them together to begin with. Strange Friend was, in vocalist Rick Anthony’s words, borne out of “a desire to try and get back to that feeling of it just being a bunch of us in a room playing music together.” It's an attempt to capture the six of them live; raw, rugged, perhaps looser, but still fit to burst with earworms and oddities from every nook and cranny.

Strange Friend doesn't have one firm concept at its root but several, infused with multiple meanings it reflects the constant percolation of voices within the Scottish six-piece, all jostling for their say. “It can indirectly refer to a lot of different things,” says Anthony of the album’s title. “Living in a world that’s increasingly hyper-connected through the internet yet increasingly disconnected in terms of actual real human relationships. It could also refer to the band and our relationships to each other; our individual relationship to the band as a thing; our relationship to this particular album. It's like a strange friend that we can't quite shake. Or our relationship to music as a whole.”

Yet musically Strange Friend is perhaps the most straight-up set of recordings the band have put to wax. Fans of their previous critically-acclaimed albums, fear not; those burbling, fluttering electronics that drag their sound through a wormhole and out into the 70’s alongside the soundtracks of John Carpenter and the kosmische of Kraftwerk and Neu! remain; the elements of folk; the woozy organ sounds – most apparent on ‘Clapshot’ – that knock each song just off its centre enough to feel alien, but familiar enough not to feel lost, are still there. The difference is now it feels as though an imaginary thread’s been pulled tight through it all; The Phantom Band were always a rock band that enjoyed pushing the pre-conceptions of what that could mean – never the other way round. Strange Friend, from the driving opening statement of intent, ‘The Wind That Cried The World,’ to ‘Doom Patrol’s’ thunderous guitar breakdown (“a break that allowed us to pretend we were in a heavy metal band for a few wonderful moments,”) through to ‘Sweatbox’s’ hot, claustrophobic garage rock and the chuntering, staccato synth emissions of ‘The Women Of Ghent’ (equally inspired by statues in the Ghent museum and and extremely tall Belgian couple the band encountered on tour there) all hit with satisfying instantaneity.
“The seeds of the songs are the result of an initial collective aimlessness where we weren’t worried about what was the music was going to sound like,” says Duncan Marquiss. “It’s about creating an environment where you increase your chances of having happy accidents. We agreed we wouldn't record until we were ready and that meant that anyone who was interested in the band wouldn't be hearing from us for a few years.” The group wrote as they’ve always done, sessions of improvised jams unearthing nuggets of ideas, like sifting through silt, which they’d then come back on. They recorded the bulk of the material at Chem 19 in Blantyre, working with Paul Savage and then The Wants’ engineer Derek O'Neill again, with some recordings done in their own studio. The main difference from the last two albums was in the production which the band took more of an active role. "The music seemed to start taking control of itself. Is it possible to produce an album passive-aggressively? If so, we did that" explains Andy Wake.

It’s been three and a half years since anyone heard anything from The Phantom Band, something that they disregard as a notable time away. “We’ve always moved at our own glacial pace,” says Marquiss. Yet, with due respect to the group, their absence has been long enough to have been felt; their time taken in getting the record together was down partly to the inevitabilities of outside lives, partly due to a change of drummer – with Iain Stewart now behind the kit - and partly because of the fiercely democratic ethos the band has maintained since its beginning.

Strange Friend, like their previous outings, is the sound of six clearly distinct personalities attempting to inflict their will on the rest of the group – it’s no surprise the phrase “love/hate” is brought up repeatedly by all its members in an attempt to describe their relationship with the band as an entity – but it’s that fission between each other’s contributions that provides the intangible individuality of their music. “Like all true utopias it can feel impossible to maintain,” admits Marquiss. “But we'd have fallen apart long ago if any one band member took the reins, and that friction between people throws up music that no single person in the band would have imagined otherwise. I still hope our utopia will turn into whisky fountains and flying sandwiches.” It’s something that you can’t help but feel would be fully deserved for these most strange but wonderful returning friends.