Ash, The Duchess, York, July 4; Leeds Festival, August 27

The three-piece from Downpatrick, County Down, in Northern Ireland, are now divided between Ireland and New York, where frontman Tim Wheeler and bassist Mark Hamilton both moved five years ago.

“So when we do tour, it makes sense to us to do as many shows as possible now, and it’s fun going back to places we haven’t done for ages,” says Tim, whose summer schedule combines a heap of festival appearances with lower-key shows in York, Buckley, Falmouth, Cardiff, Whitehaven and such like.

Tim and Mark did the Irish thing of crossing the Big Pond for the Big Apple, not initially for musical reasons, but for “the lure of a couple of girls”.

How’s it going?

“Well, Mark still has his girl… and we’ve got a studio out there now. I always used to go out to New York for inspiration and I’d come home brimming with ideas for songs, and that’s stayed with me,” says Tim, whose band have been together for 18 years.

The songwriting has been prolific, especially in the wake of Ash parting company with Warner after their Twilight Of The Innocent album in 2007. That divorce set in motion their A-Z series of singles, a series that will have reached the letter X by the time they play Leeds.

“We felt that the way people were buying music had changed, downloading it rather than buying an album, and if they were buying it, they were buying a couple of singles. Now you can get a song out there in a day,” says Tim.

The last group to focus on such a run of singles was Leeds band The Wedding Present, who issued a single a month in 1992, all of them entering the Top 40.

“I thought about The Wedding Present, and I knew that our strength had always been as a singles band,” says Tim.

Ash spent two years up front working on the project at their Manhattan studio. “We’ve recorded the series as we’ve gone along; we’ve done bits of touring and then come back and recorded the new songs we’ve been playing,” says Tim.

“It’s been fun because… with an album, you’ve worked on it in the dark and when it comes out you feel like going straight back into the studio after getting the reaction to it, but recording these singles in the way we’re doing them is a way of beating that frustration and feeding off the reaction.

“Part of the great feeling of freedom has been that it wasn’t an album we were making and it didn’t have to be cohesive – and the more we’ve experimented, the better, because we don’t want any two songs to sound the same. Now, we can play in pretty much any style, though at their heart, they’re all still pop songs.”

Ash have benefited from the sense of adventure released by the singles project. “You learn so much about yourself when setting yourself challenges; mainly that there aren’t any limits. It’s given us confidence that we can do anything,” says Tim, who feels he is still progressing as a musician at 33.

“Even after 20 years of playing guitar, every few months I go through a learning binge and learn something new.”

The first 13 singles have been gathered already on a compilation CD, A-Z Vol 1, and Vol 2 will follow in October or November. The first release is also available in a limited-edition CD/DVD with an A-Z tour diary filmed last year, with the second compilation likely to replicate that format.

“I don’t think it will be another tour diary, but we could do a collection of the DVDs… or a bonus disc of additional tracks… or maybe a live show,” says Tim, mulling over the possibilities.

Come Z, he will have to make his mind up.

• Ash play The Duchess, York, on Sunday and Leeds Festival on August 27. York tickets cost £15 on 0844 477 1000 or £17 on the door from 7.30pm.

• Running through the alphabet, the 26 songs in Ash’s A-Z series are being released on the band’s Atomic Heart Records label. They are available through all major digital outlets; on limited seven-inch vinyl by mail order from the band’s website, ash-official.com; and all good record shops.