“We took from Nine Inch Nails.”

Conor ‘Deego’ Deegan speaks to Victoria Segal.

What was the mood like when you reunited to make Skinty Fia?

“It was good for us to have space from each other, really being able to live our own lives and be our own people. We came back together with loads of different influences for the songs. So, for Jackie Down The Line, I’d been experimenting with all these different kind of pedals, I’d been trying to work out sounds like Nine Inch Nails. I think that was the kind of thing you could only come up with if you had a load of time on your hands. There’s a lot to be taken from Nine Inch Nails in terms of arrangements and instrumentation. That kind of fragile approach to beauty, even among the earlier brash stuff.”

That “fragile approach to beauty” is apparent on opening track In ár gCroíthe Go Deo (“In Our Hearts Forever”).

“It’s a very strange song to play. We were actually laughing when we were writing it. It was me and [guitarist Conor] Curley singing this minor harmony like choirboys, singing in Irish. When the drums come in there’s that moment of hope and uplift. It’s about a woman who wasn’t allowed to put “In ár gCroíthe Go Deo” on her gravestone in England because the town council saw it as a political thing to put the Irish language on a gravestone.”

How did the accordion-based The Couple Across The Way take shape?

“We had this ambition of making a double album. One half was going to be the record it is now, the other half was going to be Irish traditional music, or new songs we’d written in the style of Irish traditional music. We’ve all written songs like that over the years, we’ve got a lot of them. The Couple Across The Way was one of those. The story behind the song itself is that Grian opened one of his windows and could hear his older neighbours arguing a lot. He was living with his fiancée, and he was wondering about the difference between old love and young love, hopes and fears. We’d all read Stoner [the 1965 novel by John Williams] as well. We all got really obsessed with that book last year, so I think he was thinking about that when he wrote it as well. I think it has a similar tone, a similar conciseness to the tragedy of it, you know?”

Is Skinty Fia the final part of a trilogy?

“I always dreamed as a teenager of making three great albums, like Nirvana had. That was my ambition – so now that we’ve done that, I don’t really mind what we do.”