On the first album, you were basically just working with Malay. Are you more open to working with collaborators now?

The thing for me on the first album, I wanted that to stand alone as a body of work that I’d put together, as I said at that time. Before that, I’d put records out with four other guys for five years, and I wanted to do stuff that was solely me. I focused on the stuff I wanted to do with Malay, and put some songwriter stuff on there.

I’ve done that again on this record, but I’ve tried to do more mainstream songs too, because obviously my fans want to listen to something that’s a bit more upbeat and feel-good and not necessarily always as thought-provoking or deep as my shit, haha. I have to do something that’s a bit more mainstream because they want to listen to some fun stuff, rather than listen to depressing songs all the time. I appreciate that. I’ve took that on board. I’m trying to do some more fun stuff for them. I’ve got a few tricks on there.

The Sia song came out incredible. How did that come about?

I didn’t get in the studio with Sia — I did the majority of the song already, and my management played it during a meeting with her. She really liked it, so she basically said, “Can I do something on it?” She did it separately, though, and I’d really like to work with her in a studio. She was probably the person who got it the most, straight away. I just thought she was really cool. She didn’t take much time, she just knew what she was doing.

I know you worked with Timbaland too. What was that like?

He was really fucking cool. I met him, he came down to the studio a couple times, and we did some cool stuff together. The song is really sick. It actually came from a voice note that I had on my phone and I sent it to him. He was like, “OK, let me do something with it.” We sampled the voice note and made a song out of it. He was really cool. He’s hip-hop, man. His drums are always Timbaland drums, so it was definitely in that pocket.

Do you play any instruments on the album?

I played bits here and there. I played a few chords of guitar, a couple keys, piano, some synth, some basic computer-pressing shit, when we try to pretend we’re musicians and press buttons on keyboards, haha. I did a little bit of that. I’ve dabbled.

