The band have focused on making an album that was going to "touch as many people as possible".
The band have focused on making an album that was going to "touch as many people as possible".
Three years have seen a change of tack, and line-up, for Temper Trap — and the result is ready for all to hear.
Temper Trap's upcoming album is the culmination of three years of work, losing a bandmate and opening themselves up to change.
It hasn't been an easy road, and the band are all too aware of how long their fans have had to wait - their last album, The Temper Trap, was released four years ago.
They did some touring, went through the usual motions and set to work writing the next one within a year, but that's when it stalled.
Lead guitarist Lorenzo Sillitto quit the band in October 2013, to "try new things" - at the time, their third album was expected to drop in early 2014. It didn't happen.
The band's keyboardist and guitarist Joseph Greer says Sillitto's departure was a shock, but because it happened as they were starting on the new album, it allowed them to change tack.
"I don't think any of us saw it coming. But ... it sort of made us evaluate how we were going to move forward, in a lot of ways it brought us closer together. We had to make music that sounded just as big, if not bigger, but with less people," says Greer.
There was an element of "cutting the fat", only keeping parts of songs that absolutely needed to be there.
It also opened the door for collaboration, and the band brought producers into their process for the first time, welcoming the likes of Pascal Gabriel (Rihanna, Sia), Malay (Frank Ocean, John Legend), and Damian Taylor (Bjork, Unkle).
But new approaches meant more time, and all of these factors contributed to a three-year slog.
"It's not the ideal situation, obviously, but we just wanted to get it right," says Greer.
"It took about three years to write and we were writing the whole time. We had a few false starts and that kind of thing - we just didn't think we had the songs."
So they kept writing, focusing more on guitars and losing the synth-heavy sound that was prevalent throughout their second album.
"We just wanted to make an album that was going to touch as many people as possible," says Greer.
The finished product, Thick as Thieves is due to release on June 10.
The band will follow up with live shows all over the world, though having just been to New Zealand in May, it's unclear when they'll return.
