Declan McKenna does like to be beside the seaside. During the pandemic lockdowns, the glam-indie troubadour left London for Brighton as he waited for his second album Zeros to be released, and has stayed there ever since. ‘The idea of escaping somewhere felt good,’ he says. ‘London is great but it has its pitfalls and it can be an exhausting place to live.’

McKenna had barely stopped for breath since first breaking through in 2015 as the winner of Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent competition, seducing a fanbase of his teen peers with politicised pop nuggets such as the FIFA-critical ‘Brazil’, follow-up pops at conversion therapy and right-wing media, and the generation-rallying ‘The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home’.

Now in his mid-twenties, he’s learned to stop worrying and just love creativity for the sake of creativity. ‘It’s not like at the start where you say yes to everything and you wind up living so fast and playing so many gigs,’ he says. ‘I was very lucky to have a lot of hype around the first record. It was just go, go, go, and always aiming for a big next step. Whereas now I see it more as this is my life now, and how do I want it to be. I don’t necessarily want to be moving at that pace all the time.’

McKenna is inviting the listener to join him in the laid-back sonic odyssey of his latest collection, What Happened To The Beach? ‘A lot of the third album is about slowing down,’ he says. ‘The second album is quite a sugar rush. It’s constant energy for the most part whereas to enjoy the third album to the fullest you have to sit back a little bit and let it flow.’ Where Zeros borrowed some of its style from sprawling 70s concept albums, the concept this time is that there is no concept.

‘Thinking is often the enemy of your creativity,’ he says. ‘We caught lightning in a bottle. Let’s just make sure it doesn’t blow up in our faces.’ The album cover features McKenna wielding a metal detector against an azure sky, foraging for those unexpected treasures. Working at leisure in Los Angeles with producer Luca Buccellati, he hit upon an eclectic menu, taking in the finger-popping ‘Nothing Works’ (‘a celebration of hopelessness’), the Beck-like funk stew of ‘I Write The News’, and cosmic indie soul in ‘Mulholland’s Dinner And Wine’.

What Happened To The Beach? is certainly infused with California sunshine but McKenna reckons he’ll stick to his own coastal retreat. ‘LA is a nice place to dip my toes in but you spend a lot of time driving; and there are lots of elements that are a bit odd and alien for me compared to little Brighton where you can walk everywhere.’ Next stop is the eminently walkable Edinburgh, with a show which lets it all happen as per his newfound suck-it-and-see approach. ‘The big difference is that it’s less like a rock show. In keeping with the weird groovy world of the new album, the best way to enjoy it is to dance.’

Declan McKenna, Edinburgh Playhouse, 12 August, 8pm.