Here they are then: Crumb, a band, sort of effortlessly. After releasing two EPs of the songs they recorded in college (2016’s Crumb and 2017’s Locket), the subsequent critical buzz led to a short DIY tour (“like house basement shows, really low key… down the east coast”). Three years later they are still touring, having supported bedroom-rock musician Alex G. And now Crumb are about to drop their first album, Jinx; a strangely delicate psych-rock and jazz inflected record that has already been bewitching audiences at their live shows. It all seems to have happened quite quickly: the critical acclaim, the international tours – before they’ve even released an album. There are bands that work for years and years to build an audience base that allows for that kind of experience. I wonder whether there are moments when the four of them have to pinch themselves.

Brian nods. “The past few years have honestly just been those moments repeating themselves continually. Our expectations were really none. Like really, so modest at the beginning, just focussing on the songs and what the band was gonna look like. So there’s a lot of those moments. Being able to play alongside bands we love very much, and connecting with bands and releasing music is always that. Yeah.”

“The Europe tour was really crazy,” Jesse continues. “I hadn’t been to most of those places and to be there for one day at a time… I think we played twelve shows in ten different cities in fifteen days and it was just like one big snapshot. My memories are so… it feels kind of like a dream. I was there but I was half asleep. It was so cool to see like, families, children – like 9 year olds and parents coming to our show. So I think it was again those experiences over and over, seeing what your music has done in the world…”

The highs of the touring experience sound incredible – playing to hundreds of fans in London, hearing their song lyrics sung back at them, tracing the footsteps of bands like Black Sabbath at remote venues in the mountain towns of Germany. Even the camaraderie sounds idyllic – Brian tells a story about how, travelling in a separate car from Lila and Jesse, he and Jonathan would play a game where they challenged each other to play tracks the other would hate, introducing one another to “weird free jazz”, and “heavy thrash” in the process.

Still, the constant touring has been a learning experience, and navigating life on the road and a burgeoning music career, just out of college, makes it difficult to carve out a clear identity, and to engage with the wider world. It’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. “I think the last year or two has been a lot,” Brian says. “Like, we’ve been touring and making music non-stop and trying to balance that with being ourselves. Being people and being musical people, like, getting to have that, real life needs to be funnelled in as well. So we can enjoy all this. Because no one teaches you how to tour – you have to learn and there are a lot of good things and a lot of hard things.”

One of the good things, Jesse explains, is the way being on the road forces you to scale down, and remember what’s important. “I think there’s something that empowers actually about reducing your stuff – your belongings, your property – to what you can bring with you. And you realise the insides are the stuff you bring with you. And I feel like in daily life it’s very easy to be surrounded by, like, your environment, your stature and what you feel like you hold onto. So just to break that apart, put it back together… see where you’re at.”

Lila agrees. “I feel like I’ve just started to embrace that lifestyle, not really having a base. As opposed to just being in one place. It’s definitely a huge adjustment. And we all at the moment don’t have any other job besides being in the band so that’s an interesting thing to navigate, just structuring your time to live; to do the creative stuff.”