Pitchfork: As far as why it took so long for this album to be completed, people have talked about it being due to a mixture of licensing issues and perfectionism. Would you say that’s true?

Robbie Chater: Those two issues are both correct—although transcending them ended up being as much a part of the journey as the record itself. We had to make a lot of music to break through that perfection thing and really start to embrace all our imperfections. There was a great point halfway through making this record that we realized it’s almost sounding like a loose, punky, psychedelic rock’n’roll record with samples, and once we came to that realization, things started moving a lot quicker.

As far as samples, they started clearing stuff years ago, but then there would be some hold-up and they’d have to go back and renegotiate. People would give permission for us to use the sample, and then a certain amount of time would elapse and they would Google who the band is and be like, “Oh shit, I can ask for more money.” That sort of thing took forever. And it’s all sampled, really. There are the guest vocals and beautiful orchestration from [French composer] Jean-Michel Bernard, but every song is a sample-based song. There were also three years in the mid-2000s when I was really unwell. I was diagnosed with a couple of separate autoimmune diseases, so I was out of action.

You can hear the time that went into [the album], especially in the moments when the tracks join to each other—it took a lot of time to find the right sounds of people on the street and all those things. A lot of tracks were made quite quickly, but putting the whole thing together was time-intensive.

You had hundreds of different mixes for the album’s first single, “Frankie Sinatra,” before settling on the final version, which made me curious: At what point does it become difficult to hear the same song over and over?

Tony Di Blasi: There were definitely points where every time I heard that song I wanted to jump out of my body, but it’s part of the process, where you just can’t feel the music anymore. In the end I just left it to Robbie to finish it. The compiling of the album is difficult because the journey of the record is so much about a feeling in the songs and, after a while, if you’re not feeling it, you can’t compile it in the way it’s supposed to be compiled.

RC: Feelings are the core of what we do, but we have to have breaks and take some time away from it.

TDB: Or we’ll go crazy.

How many samples are on this record?

RC: I’ve got no idea. There’s so many fragments and different pieces.

How did you go about clearing all the samples this time?

RC: There’s a lady called Pat Shannahan that lives in L.A. who cleared all the samples on the first record, and she cleared all the samples on this record, too. She’s an amazing lady. They call her “the detective.” She cleared all the samples on all those old Beck and Beastie Boys records. So we’ll send her all the information we can find and then she goes off and tries to track down these albums. Often [the artists] are not even interested in corresponding, so it’s a crazy process.

Or someone might be dead.

RC: Exactly. She’s a one-woman operation who seems to know everybody because she’s done it so long, and she just goes to work in terms of tracking sounds.

Was there a specific sample that was especially difficult to clear?

RC: We were very lucky to get permission to use the Beatles sample [of “Come Together”] on “Noisy Eater.” That one was initially refused and then we ended up finding contacts for both Paul McCartney and Yoko’s people through friends of friends. We sent them the track and just wrote a letter explaining our process and what we’re all about, and that this is a project from the heart and it’s not a money-making exercise and it was a sincere use of the original music. That was a song that we were going to take off the album if the sample didn’t come through.