ORNAMENTS From The Silver Arcade is the third album from Oxford trio Young Knives, and the contents of the Knife drawer have changed.

Blowing away the old methods, they swapped instruments in rehearsals, and to change the sound new instruments were introduced and songs were attacked from multiple directions.

You can hear the results when brothers Henry and Thomas Dartnall and Oliver Askew play Fibbers, in York, tomorrow night.

“From the release of the last album [Superabundance], it’s been almost three years to this one,” says Henry. “For the first album, we’d written all our lives and then for the second one we were itching to do it all again, but this one was more hardcore, thinking what we would do next as the post-punk scene was fading away.”

Young Knives needed to sharpen their act all over again, and so the spiky pop trio broke away from their English references, ultimately broadening their post-punk template to encompass acid-house grooves, Krautrock, even American soul.

“It’s always limiting for people to label you as anything,” says Henry.

“Some people react well to it but I tend to think, ‘Don’t call me that’, and though I liked it at the time, we were always being compared with XTC, and though I knew one or two of their songs, there was more to our music than that.”

The route to their 2011 overhaul was not direct, however. “For six months we wanted to be Captain Beefheart, but no-one would listen to that,” says Henry.

“So we took different influences on board, and then realised we were going to a darker places, trying to make credible music by making serious music, like all bands in the shadow of Radiohead, which we’d been doing on the second album.

“And I haven’t got a problem with that, except that there is this thinking with bands like The XX, that if you make serious music, it has to be po-faced.”

Cue change of tack. “We said, ‘Let’s do something that’s different from that, something that has soul but has humour too’,” says Henry.

“Some of my favourite things have always had humour, like The Kinks and Frank Zappa… and we decided we wanted to make something joyful that revelled in beauty rather than in the bleak.

“If people then throw XTC at us again, that’s fine, because I do subscribe to that attitude – and it’s not easy for a middle-class white boy to come up with something distinctive!”

Young Knives settled on ten songs for a 40-minute album – recorded with producer Nick Launay in Los Angeles – that should appeal on various levels, reckons Henry.

“You could listen and hopefully go, ‘Well, this is nice’ on a Radio One level, but then you could listen on headphones and enjoy it on another level, which is why it took us so long.

“That combination is what the most popular songs of all time have done, and you have to set yourself a high bar to match them, because what’s the point if you don’t do that?”