The last time I had a part in a BRMC interview, Peter Hayes, Robert Levon Bean and Nick Jago looked – shall we say - like they didn’t want to be there.

Plonked on a stage in front of a sea of international music journos for the Jack Daniels Birthday Celebration in Nashville, the threesome looked awkward to say the least. Staring at the floor, impenetrable in sunglasses, the band put up a wall of near silence to the questions posed by the rather bizarre press conference’s (The Clash’s Mick Jones was due on stage next followed by Hard-Fi: don’t ask...) guest chair person, an American talk show host we were supposed to have heard of.

This time around things are rather different. Sat opposite me in a swanky, private room of a West London hotel that’s doing its best impression of an airport lounge, Hayes, Levon Bean and new member, Leah Shapiro, look slightly more at ease (though the conversation’s not exactly free-flowing).

BRMC have been away too long. Line-up changes and record company ramblings have meant their last studio album (the largely instrumental and rather disappointing The Effects Of 333) came out as a download only nearly two years ago, and their last record actually available in shops was 2007’s similarly disappointing Baby 81. This time around though, the band seem to have found a return to form. Their sixth record, Beat The Devil’s Tattoo, while not being anything new exactly (this is BRMC we’re talking about) is an amalgamation of the best bits of everything they’ve done before. They have a new drummer in the agreeable shape of ex-Raveonette Leah Shapiro (who apparently did her drum takes for the record in four days and sat around smoking cigarettes waiting for the boys to finish things off for nearly a year) and seem to have put the controversy of Nick Jago’s exit behind them. And, oh yeah, they’re still disgustingly cool.

Were they gonna answer any of the questions this time around though? Well, actually, they were (for the most part anyway)…

So then… Excited about the new record?
Leah Shapiro: Yeah, we’re very excited. It’s my first album with them so all of this very new to me. I’m just kind of sorting things out and trying to find my place.

How would you describe the album?
Peter Hayes: I think it’s a good mixture of all of the other albums. And in some ways captures some moments that are better than the others.

The recording was done whilst holed up in a basement studio during a really harsh winter. Was that an intense or isolated period?
Leah Shapiro: It was strange times. The house in which we did it was kind of like a commune. In a way it was very relaxing, but of course after a while when you’re in this place that’s not very near to a big city – because it’s quite far outside of Philadelphia – yeah, you get a little bit of cabin fever.

Robert Levon Bean: There’s two chapters to the recording. The first half of it was that it was good and a nice feeling to be isolated, and have no distractions. It was just about the music and living there and either recording or rehearsing or writing. And then in the second half we started to get a little twitchy and a little bit of cabin fever started to set in. It’s the flip side of the coin, and I think maybe it caused us to start working on it too much at the end. There’s a couple of songs where we changed the arrangements like six different times. I think we got out just in time…

Was was the place like?
Robert Levon Bean : Well there’s one side to small towns where it’s relaxing and nice to get away, then there’s another side to small towns where you just feel trapped or something. It’s good to have both. It’s good to get it right. The people round there don’t lock there doors at night. The place where we were staying would have people popping in all the time. They were an amazing family. There was only one bar in the town though…

How did you hook up with the guys that owned the house?
Robert Levon Bean: We recorded Howl there. They are in a band that we played with back in 2002 and we really loved their band and we got to know them and they said their doors were open and we were welcome any time so that’s how it happened…

Did you want the album to be a real trip through American music? That’s what it says on the press release...
Peter Hayes: We just wanted to make the record have depth. If it comes across that way then fine but the only conscious thing was to make it not be one-sided, like full on electric all the way through and then throw in one acoustic at the end. We wanted it to take you on a journey. Not necessarily a US journey though…

Robert Levon Bean: When we made Howl we weren’t really sure if people would like that side of the band or not, and so we built our confidence with being able to integrate our other side into the music. So, it made us think that you know it’s kind of okay to just let things happen and not have to sell one kind of sound. I guess we’re lucky enough to not have to do that. Everything’s on this from all the albums we’ve done but that was an accident really. We didn’t mean for that to happen…

Does the new line-up make this record feel like a fresh start?
Peter Hayes: From our point of view, what basically happened was we had a falling out with our drummer and there was a couple of days of panic where the only question in everybody’s head was ‘do we carry on and keep playing music or do we stop’ and ‘are we gonna still call it Black Rebel or not’, and all of those kinds of things that you’d wonder; and I guess we were just kind of in the dark for a while. We had shows coming up really soon in Europe and Leah was the only drummer we knew that had really stuck in our heads because she was kind of unforgettable as a musician so we called her and she filled in. When we played with her we were kind of surprised how much it felt like ‘us’ still. We didn’t know if it was gonna sound pretty different, and maybe if it had we wouldn’t have the right to keep the name. So I guess we kind of adhered to the sound. This thing that we’d created that is beyond any individual…

And it’s your first proper release on your new label, Abstract Dragon…
Peter Hayes: I guess that’s where the fresh start would be. We’ve had so many though; so many fresh starts. Drummer leaving, drummer coming back; drummer leaving; drummer coming back. It’s already happened a few times.

Does it bring with it a new sense of freedom?
Robert Levon Bean: I guess it was like a kind of emergency parachute. You know, like something you could pull if you needed to. We didn’t really wanna do that until now but I think now is more of an emergency that’s it’s been in the past as far as labels going under and stuff. I guess that now it’s needed. It was maybe more of a luxury before to have an independent where as now it’s survival. Having an independent allows you to be creative and do cool things but now we need it just to be self-sufficient I guess.

How do you see the industry at the moment?
Robert Levon Bean: The whole thing was flat and bloated, you know. It was time for a change. Kids shouldn’t be worried about record labels, like ‘oh no, what’s EMI gonna do’. If I was a kid, I wouldn’t give a shit about that. The music will find its way. Music and musicians will find their way, just like anything else. The ones that have to say it, that have to get their music out, they’re the ones that are gonna stick it out because, you know, they’re probably obsessive compulsives from birth with the spirit of music.

What made you pick that name for the album?
Robert Levon Bean: Well, we needed one desperately. We couldn’t think of anything. Leah gave me a book way back with some Edgar Allan Poe short stories in it and he kind of ended up haunting the album in a weird way. I took the line from one of the short stories in it called The Devil In The Belfry. There was this line, “beat the Devil’s tattoo”, and I didn’t know what it meant and it just kind of sounded strange so I looked it up and discovered that it had a really interesting history. It was a saying that disappeared about 100 years ago. The original meaning of it was that it was a drummer bringing soldiers back home at night to the camps, and I liked the idea of that; but that meaning actually changed with time and it became the idea of like a restless spirit, like when you tap your feet or your fingers. I like the origins of words and things like that…

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club play The Electric Ballroom on 15 April, The Forum on 23 April and Concord 2, Brighton on 29 April.