Wild Beasts get their claws out with a return to animal form, as Tim Hughes discovers

Wild Beasts are once again living up to their fierce name.

Always striving to find something new, their fifth album Boy King sees them rediscovering that visceral, snarling discontent that sets them apart from lesser beasts.

It’s tense, snarling, intricately-detailed hard-edged electronica with groove, irresistible rhythm and an all-pervading sense of doom.

“We are back to being p*ssed off!" says singer Hayden Thorpe, who’s rangy, at times falsetto, voice drifts above the gritty skittish, psychedelic electro-rock like a benign mushroom cloud – his vocals chiming and tangling with those of bandmate Tom Fleming.

"After five records there had to be an element of 'WTF?', says Hayden.

He says they decided to find their way into the follow-up to Present Tense with a complete change in how they approached their craft.

The moment of realisation that they needed to change how they wrote songs was, he says, hugely liberating: "The only thing you can do from that point onwards is turn your vehicle into traffic and play chicken with yourself, and do all the things you said you'd never do."

"On the last day of making Boy King I had a minor breakdown in knowing what part of myself I was revealing. It's a bit ugly, a bit grubby, arrogant.”

Revealing and direct, it marks a distinct emotional sea change to of 2014's Present Tense. If that album found Hayden, Tom, Ben Little and Chris Talbot in reflective mood, this one finds them in a darker, and far more engaging frame of mind – as we will discover tonight, when they bring it to the O2 Academy Oxford tonight.

Hayden says the album was the product of intense writing – the band sticking at it from nine to five in their East London studio.

As for inspiration, that came, he reveals, from a collision of the soulful pop of Justin Timberlake and industrial grit of Nine Inch Nails, fueled by a friendly rivalry between he and Tom.

"He arrived at the rehearsal room early on with a white Jackson guitar and started shredding over what I’d always intended to be a soul album,” he says.

Such creative friction proved key to unleashing the unique pop sensibility of Boy King – Fleming’s feisty experimentation unlocking new dimensions in Hayden’s writing.

"I began to hear a lot more aggression in what he was bringing; a lot more forward-facing, less pensive stuff," says Tom. "Every time I did something ridiculous, everyone responded well, which enabled us all to push everything further and have more fun with it. Everything I thought was guilty came across really well in the rehearsal room".

They took the results to Dallas and producer John Congleton.

"We wanted to find the most insensitive way of finishing it, the most crude, hack-handed," Hayden says. "It had to be guttural, the absolute opposite of Present Tense – that was the only way of keeping it alive".

"John made us get in there, get on and do it," says Tom. "English politeness never featured."

"John just said 'come with an open heart and an open mind'," Thorpe adds. "Just asking that simple thing, among all the noise and the superstition of making a record, was for me quite profound. I thought ‘okay, this is a very human experience’, and it's a human record in that sense.

“It's a bit sloppy, it's a bit glitchy, it's a bit unkept. That for me is what's so heartening about it. We've allowed the ugliness to show."

  • Wild Beasts play the O2 Academy tonight.
  • For tickets go to ticketweb.co.uk