“Amebix is me, myself, [guitarist] Stig and Roy [Mayorga, drums],” asserts founding vocalist/bassist Rob Miller, “and that's the way it is. It's not a project piece, if this album does anything it'll be as a three-piece. With Stone Sour it's very tour orientated, there's a lot of hard work, with us it's a case of, 'We don't have to do this, we can take our time'. There's no great pressure to record an album and tour every single country in the world, we can pick and choose stuff if we want to – go out and play three gigs in a field if we want to do that, that'll be fine too. The whole thing about this process is being very much aware of the doors that have opened to us and having walked through them when the oppourtunity presents itself, nothing has been forced about it at all. We're no longer young guys who really want to make a living out of playing music, we're going with what we're given.”

23 years since the last original material from the originators of harshly apocalyptic metallic punk and the promised new album draws ever closer, following pretty sharply on the rough-shod heels of Amebix's recent reunion shows and the limited re-recorded classics EP 'Redux'. But, to inappropriately quote The Smiths, how soon is now?

“I would hope within the year,” replies Rob, “it doesn't need that much more work on it – we've got artwork sorted out, we're just waiting on Roy being available. He's just a fucking great man basically, he's an engineer, he's brilliant at getting stuff down, he's a great songwriter, he's a multi-instrumentalist and he's good at pretty much everything, if it wasn't for him you could definitely say this wouldn't be happening.”

As for how it's going to sound, Rob is keen to avoid any specifics, underlining the importance of a complete experience that reels you in and devours your attention.

“It's album in the sense that I'd like people to be able to listen to this from one end to the other, to be able to give it time because it has an increasing atmosphere that comes from something very light to being something a little bit darker and more intriquing, and we wanna carry that one through. I want people to get back into the idea of listening to music, like when we used to sit and listen to Pink Floyd from one end of an album to another. You'd get stuff out of that. Like listening to 'Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath' all the way through. I ain't going to skip a track, it's all running together.

“The way we're going to approach things in the future is a lot more obtuse lyrically, we're going into subject matters that've I've always wanted to talk about, which will allow for people to get involved. And I want people to be involved, rather than be on somebody's shuffle list.”

As is often the case, the cult surrounding Amebix grew immeasurably following their dispersal in 1987.

“When I got my first 56k modem, pretty much,” answers Rob as to when he first noticed the devoted following they'd inspired. “I was doing a bit of browsing and I noticed people were talking about us, particularly in the States where there was such an aura of mystery around the band because there wasn't that much available, there were few photographs and there wasn't any footage – there were just the recordings. There were also the occult connotations from all those years in Devon before we moved up to Bristol, there was so many stories, conjecture and rumour and some them even had a basis in truth. It's nice, I kinda like that. It's a shame really, in the sense that in the modern day, everything is so exposed and you can find out about a band immediately, you play a gig in LA and the next day you go onto YouTube and there it is, it's up. Everybody knows your business before you've even taken a shit. It can take that mystery out of things, and it can also make things more immediately consumeable, they're easier to get rid of and people don't connect so much I don't think. Growing up with John Peel, and growing up with the whole punk thing, the underground where you'd deeply involved just to find out what was going on and you'd get glimpses into that world, you'd make an effort to go out and find out what it was all about.”

The lyrical themes of Amebix certainly benefited for their ambiguity. Rather than the sweeping political diatribes of many of their contemporaries, Amebix used an element of fantasy and toyed with the natural world to compose a meaning that wouldn't be diluted by the passage of time.

“I think it's alive and well, myself,” Rob agrees. “I would love to think that the way I dealt with my life has been manifested in that message, which has been about being true to oneself and in contact with the natural world, and supernatural world too, and manifesting this primal energy in whichever way is available to you. I think that was the message of Amebix, it was one very much of empowerment. I think that some of the people that we've met on the journey that we've done on the last year and a half, it really has struck a chord with them. It helped me at a time when I really needed it and I've heard so many interesting stories, I've got such an intimate connection with what I've done musically that I couldn't possibly have hoped for at the time. Back then we were just playing to three guys and a dog, and there was nobody who seemed to give a toss about what we were doing – nobody particularly liked us when were alive and kicking.”