It comes as a surprise that Mogwai, the Scottish behemoths of post-rock who have perfected their wall of noise over three decades, still get pre-game nerves. But when we speak, at T-minus six weeks to the band’s 11th album launch, guitarist Stuart Braithwaite admits to some butterflies. ‘It’s one of the periods where I’m most nervous,’ he says. ‘You’re in this bubble making it, and then other people are now going to hear it. What are they going to think?’ So far, The Bad Fire’s listeners have been complimentary, ‘which is a big relief.’ Has that ever not been the case? ‘Our second record,’ Braithwaite remembers of Come On Die Young, 1999’s follow-up to Mogwai Young Team. ‘A lot of people were like “what the fuck have you done here?” Actually, people really like that record now, so I guess it was just a departure.’

Other bands may have felt the pressure writing this new record. The Bad Fire comes blazing on the heels of 2021’s surprise hit, As The Love Continues, which shot to number one in the UK and earned Mogwai their first Mercury Prize nomination. But other events have kept minds occupied, most potently multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns’ two-year-old daughter being hospitalised for a rare blood disorder called aplastic anaemia. Happily, she is on the mend now. ‘There were all sorts of heavy traumatic life things going on, so the “what if people don’t like it as much as the last one?” conversation would have seemed pretty trivial,’ notes Brathwaite. ‘In hindsight, it does terrify me a bit, because the last one really did exceed expectations.’

Braithwaite has previously credited As The Love Continues’ success to the pandemic, when listeners were primed for inward-looking outlets to wrap themselves in at home. Now the world has opened up again, he’s hesitant to brand The Bad Fire as a more e​​xtroverted record. ‘It’s super introspective. I actually think the world’s scarier now. A virus that’s going to wipe out a third of the planet is almost less scary than World War III.’ 

The first song to click for Braithwaite was ‘Hi Chaos’, the whirling second track that goes heavy on drone fuzz and shredding. Burns wrote it while the rest of the band was touring Australia, having stayed behind to look after his daughter. ‘It was a very scary thing to go through,’ says Brathwaite. ‘I can’t even imagine what it was like for Barry.’ When they returned to Glasgow, ‘Hi Chaos’ was the first new song Mogwai played in the same room together. ‘We were emailing each other demos, and some of them ended up really good, but this felt like a real band environment.’

A few months later, they recruited John Congleton, the producer behind fellow post-rockers E​​xplosions In The Sky and Sigur Rós, as well as Angel Olsen’s album All Mirrors, a shared favourite for Braithwaite and Burns. ‘He’s into chaotic sounds and letting things happen naturally. It reminded me of when we’d make our very early records and we wouldn’t know what we were doing. He’s definitely not a perfectionist. I like that energy, because a lot of it sounds pretty wild.’

He’s also a good fit personality-wise, bringing bursts of levity to the studio. ‘John likes having a laugh. He was being absolutely ridiculous the entire time. There’s probably a Scottish thing as well about not being pretentious. John’s from Texas, which is pretty much the Scotland of America.’

We’re reminded here of ‘Tracy’ from Mogwai’s 1997 debut, which sampled two prank calls to their then manager and an employee at American label Jet Set. While, in Brathwaite’s words, ‘our music’s always pretty miserable,’ Mogwai remain light-hearted. ‘I think you’ve got to be, especially when your music is incredibly emotional. If you carried that into your day-to-day life, you’d never leave your bed.’

This new record comes at a time of note for Mogwai, marking 30 years since they first formed. It follows a lengthy period of reminiscence, including last year’s documentary If The Stars Had A Sound and Braithwaite’s memoir in 2023. Looking back, Braithwaite says he was reminded of all the friends who helped shape Mogwai but have sadly passed on. ‘Something in the background over this album was a sense of loss; a lot of people that had been on this journey with us weren’t there anymore. The way I interpret that is to feel lucky to have known them.’

Staying together all this time is no mean feat (still alongside Braithwaite and Burns are drummer Martin Bulloch and bassist Dominic Aitchison). What is Mogwai’s secret? ‘The short answer is we enjoy it and we still really like each other’s company. We’re a family at this point.’ Even more impressively, they’ve managed to stay independent with this their fifth album on the band’s label Rock Action. ‘We’re in a really lucky position now, having our own label, studio and rehearsal room. We couldn’t have done it when we were younger because we needed the advances to pay rent.’

With conditions for independent music still deteriorating in the UK, getting to Mogwai’s status feels increasingly out of reach for new bands. ‘I worry about grassroots venues. That really struck a chord when I was writing my book and talking about our first tour with Urusei Yatsura.’ Few of the venues Mogwai visited then have survived, adding to the weakened infrastructure for emerging music. ‘Bands don’t come out fully formed. We had to go around the whole country a couple of times before we got any good.’ 

One solution could lie in the approach taken by countries such as France and Italy, where music-venue networks receive government support. ‘I think in Britain, because the music sector is so successful, it’s taken for granted. There are so many less bands than there were years ago; it’s mostly solo artists. That’s absolutely a byproduct of how difficult it is.’ If the expense of touring keeps increasing alongside an unwavering cost-of-living crisis, Braithwaite fears this decline could be terminal. ‘The next step is people simply not being able to be musicians.’

And yet, says Braithwaite, making music is more important than ever, for both its role as interpreter and a cocoon in a turbulent decade. ‘Music can help people forget about the world, but it also can be a catalyst for change. I think about America and artists like Kendrick Lamar capturing the moment of the Black Lives Matter protests. I’m sure there will be a lot of soul searching in America over the next while with Trump back in. I think making music is a political act, even if the content of your music isn’t explicitly political. Especially now that making music is almost an altruistic thing.’

Not that he would be so bold as to put Mogwai in Lamar’s camp, Braithwaite hastens to add. His hopes for this new album are more modest, reflecting the intimate relationship the band hold with their fans. ‘My aim with every record is to try and make the world sound a bit better, and I think we’ve done that with this record. There’s some of our best music on it.’ As for what he envisions for the next 30 years: ‘I’ll be almost 80 years old, so I’d like to get to that. I’d like us to keep making music as long as people want to hear it.’

Mogwai, O2 Academy Brixton, London, Thursday 20 February; O2 Academy, Leeds, Saturday 22 February; Usher Hall, Edinburgh, Sunday 23 February; Barrowland, Glasgow, Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 May.