Were there difficulties that came with that?

Lias: There were massive difficulties that came with the power vacuum. Before it was Saul calling the shots. Now it was like, ‘This song is Nathan’s and it’s really personal to Nathan, this one is mine, and so on.’ Then there were Saul’s songs, because he eventually came back in and contributed a load. But yeah, Nathan especially had real problems.

Alex: Because it’s so personal isn’t it, having written a song. If you take it to other people when you’re not used to the process – of someone taking a bit of your song and changing it – it can be traumatic.

Lias: Initially, when I used to write lyrics, I’d submit them to the broader thing and Saul would look at it – as someone who just writes music – and go, ‘Well that’s too many fucking syllables!’ It was mortally wounding. But in a way, it was really good for me to deal with that process early on. Learning to detach yourself is a key thing that takes time to learn. I don’t think Nathan had experienced that before.

Nathan: I didn’t know the language. Once you figure out the language, you can navigate people easier. But you have to go through it. It’s just a shitty part of the process.

Alex: It’s about knowing that you don’t know everything and becoming comfortable with it.

Serf’s Up feels like a title that fits our current moment.

Lias: It’s the rise of populism, basically. The idea of the oppressed masses heroically rising up and selecting more oppression for themselves. Voting their own noses off their faces, so to speak. Whatever you want to say about that is a different thing – I’m neither here nor there with it. It was a tongue-in-cheek reflection of the current climate.

You formed in 2011, and your identity as a band was so entangled with the time and place. Could a band like Fat White Family start tomorrow, given where we are right now?

Lias: I think there’s a tendency towards self-censorship now. A lurch towards virtue-signalling and political correctness and a morality as prescribed by, like, The Guardian. If you’re 20 years old, starting a band, and you want to stir shit up, you’re going to feel nervous about putting a foot wrong.

This hyper-accountability online – where everybody’s got a file on everybody else, and it can be brought up to beat you round the head with whenever shit goes down – as far as I’m concerned, there’s a faux-left bourgeois solipsism to it. I think that needs to be tackled at every opportunity.

Why?

Lias: I genuinely don’t think morality has anything to do with art. I think that’s really important to remember at this time. That art doesn’t become a facet of some kind of political agenda.

When we started, a lot of bands kind of followed us in a stylistic way – you know, that DIY mentality. But I don’t see a lot of people willing to stick their necks out; people who are willing to make complete fools of themselves in public, or push difficult buttons. I think that’s depressing.

Nathan: Gotta push those buttons!

You mention that DIY mentality. To jump back to the original question, how would a Fat White Family starting out today fare in an era of venue closures and sky-high rents? The destruction of squatting culture, too.

Lias: I don’t think we’d have been able to exist in the same way. But we would have found a way to survive. We would have found a way to make music. Because if you really absolutely have to do it – if you have to – that’s the only way you can reconcile things.

In those days, me and Nathan just used to live in squats, and that was a big part of how we formed music. The whole thing was about finding a squat that was big enough to put a party on and rehearse in, then you were set. You’d get your wage – or dole – and you’d get a little thing going.

Nathan: If it wasn’t that, then it was £300 for a room. Back then, you could do that. Now? Not a fucking chance.

Lias: I think we’re an example of what’s good about London. How it’s always produced interesting mutant stuff. There’s a lot of cross-pollination going on in London, and that’s a brilliant part of it. But I think that’s going to happen less and less as the city becomes modernised.

Whenever I read a review – of an album, a show – you seem to be referred to you as ‘the last of a dying breed’, or words to that effect. Do you think that’s true, given what we’ve just spoken about?

Lias: When you’re extremely compromised, it can really bear fruit. Yeah, today you’re going to get a load of safe-as-houses, tick-all-the-boxes homogenised industry fodder as a result of that climate. But you’ll get one or two people who are mental enough to persist.

It’s such a fucking grave struggle to do it all, but a stronger voice can emerge there. I think all good art is born of some kind of struggle. You’re trying to resolve something in yourself and the world around you.

To jump back to the album. There’s a lightness in the music that perhaps wasn’t as obvious before. Does that reflect where you’re at personally now?

Lias: I think it definitely reflects that. We had a reputation for hard drugs, so everybody would turn up at live shows with hard drugs. It was unavoidable – a drawn-out narcotic nadir. That fog lifting and being able to look at each other was a key part of that.

Obviously, there’s going to be a lot less doom and gloom when everyone’s not fucked on heroin the whole time. Inevitably, a certain lighter attitude creeps in. But the content is always just a reflection of what everyone’s interested in. This time round, we were like, ‘Okay, we’ve made a doom, noise, heroin album. What can we do next?’

Alex: Why would you then go back and try and be really dark again? I mean, this is the first album I’ve been involved in. There are elements of the previous albums that I like, but they’re certainly not my music by any stretch of the imagination. Given the people we were working with on [the new record], it was always destined to be slightly more melodic. And, for want of a better word, more musical.

That narrative – the drugs, the fighting – was often amplified by the press, because it contributed to that whole mythology you’d built. Was it ever weird, seeing things you were going through personally playing out on such a public level?

Lias: I think you surrender yourself to that the second you render yourself a symbol. You don’t do that by accident. Any artist who says they don’t want to be famous is lying. You render yourself a living, breathing, snorting work of art. That’s part of the fun.

Fun?

We always thought it was quite funny, you know, that ritualistic lowering of the bar. That’s kind of what Serf’s Up is about: completing that narrative. Going as far as we could into debasement and self-destruction, then magically returning at the other side – with really shit haircuts [looks at Alex].