Cloud Control, with Jeremy Kelshaw far left, around 2010. "We had no idea it was going to happen, but it made sense," says keyboard player Heidi Lenffer, sitting on the balcony of a pub in Surry Hills. "His wife was pregnant with their second child and the touring life was not conducive to being a family man. "Then we had a long-haul flight to mull it over. Jeremy was an integral part of the creative process. He wrote all the bass riffs, obviously, but he was the glue. He was the organiser. Without him we had to re-establish a dynamic." Long story short – they re-established a dynamic. It took them three years and it almost killed them, but Lenffer, her brother Ulrich (drums) and singer/guitarist Alister Wright finally have a third album, called Zone. The long journey they took to get there has a number of backdrops and its fair share of doubts and crisis points. They initially set up in a derelict shop space in Redfern for about a year, with a studio's worth of gear they bought in order to be self-sufficient. All the demos from that period feature bus noise in the background.

They went back to their old school, Blue Mountains Grammar, and set up at the headmaster's house during the winter holidays. They did a couple of stints at Bundanon, a creative retreat in artist Arthur Boyd's Former residence near Nowra, creating songs while wombats rubbed themselves against the foundations of the house (yes, apparently that's a thing). The demo pile got higher and higher, but the end was nowhere in sight. Then they rented a house in Pacific Palms, near Forster on the NSW north coast. This was where things reached breaking point. "That was a four-month stint in a beach house on a property," Lenffer says. "It was cabin fever dot com. It was two bedrooms and there were three of us. We'd been writing and recording for long enough that we were starting to put pressure on ourselves. We knew we had to start getting the final versions of things and that brought out stresses and a lot of tension. "There were a few key confrontations and we got to a point where our relationships were sketchy, but we got through that. The three of us were unabated in our desire to finish the record and it reinforced the idea that we were all in this together whatever the cost." The song Zone came out of that period, when they sat down together and tried to write a new song from scratch. With the sound of soft rain in the background, a rattling backbeat, distant shouts, R&B slinkiness and a hook that states "this is how it feels in the zone", the track became a turning point and a statement of purpose.

They finished up at Haymarket, in Sydney's CBD, in a studio complex where a gaggle of Sydney artists were beavering away at their own music. One night the building was broken into. Cloud Control lost three guitars. But they finally had an album's worth of songs that no thief could steal. Three years on from hugging and crying in that little park in LA, did Lenffer ever have any doubts that Cloud Control would stay the distance? "It crossed my mind at different points that this might break us," she says. "There were times where we were drowning in demos, there was no clear way forward and it got to the point where we thought 'Will this project ever finish?' But we all knew we'd gone so deeply into this that we had to finish it. And I'm really glad we did. We've come out of it a tighter group and we have something that the three of us didn't have before." Cloud Control play Sydney's Metro Theatre on September 22; $40.10, metrotheatre.com.au. MUSICAL CLOUD-SPOTTING

Clouds – Joni Mitchell Mitchell's stark and striking 1969 album contained her enduring classic, Both Sides, Now. Fun fact: Bill and Hilary Clinton named their daughter after the song Chelsea Morning. Cloudbusting – Kate Bush The majestic 1985 song is based on a book by Peter Reich about his father Wilhelm, the controversial psychoanalyst whose inventions included the cloudbuster, which he claimed could cause rainfall. Clouds – The Go-Betweens

"The clouds are here, they aren't up in the sky, I cupped them with my hands and reached up high," sang the cryptic Robert Forster in this song from the final Go-Betweens album, 1989's 16 Lovers Lane. The Clouds Sydney quartet from the '90s based around the vocals and songwriting of Jodi Phillis and Trish Young., File next to Falling Joys and The Hummingbirds. Cloud Nothings Indie rock band from Cleveland, Ohio, that formed in 2009. Their fifth album, Life Without Sound, came out in January.