After six long years of international touring, solo projects, a life-threatening health scare and a global pandemic, the twice-Grammy-nominated Australian band Hiatus Kaiyote are weeks away from launching their third studio album – Mood Valiant.

The four-piece are made up of singer and guitarist Naomi Saalfield (also known as Nai Palm), bassist Paul Bender, keys player Simon Mavin, and drummer Perrin Moss. Their perfect fusion of classically trained and self-taught instincts, freely improvised and strategically arranged songs contribute to their signature, self-appointed 'wondercore' sound (defined as making the complex sound simple).

'I think it's a fallacy that you have to go to school to make intelligent music. It's always existed since the dawn of time,' said front-woman Nai Palm,. 'The best way to learn is to listen… and I'm really fortunate to have such emotionally intelligent creatives to bounce off of… Everyone is super sweet and wants the best for each other. We are all just nerds who love to make weird shit together'.

Choose Your Weapon, Hiatus Kaiyote's previous album, was released in 2015 and led to the likes of Beyoncé, Jay Z, Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak and Drake sampling their discography, from songs 'Molasses' and 'Building A Ladder' to 'The World It Softly Lulls'.

Mood Valiant, out on Friday 25 June, is the next chapter in this adventure series. In true Hiatus style, the mood-altering harmonies and sonic landscapes created in each track are otherworldly. But underneath the complex arrangements and rich grooves, the album at its core is a personal reflection on the challenges of the past few years. 'I feel like we charged through the mud to get this thing done,' said Bender, 'and there's just this valiant, victorious feeling, coming out of the storm into calm waters.'

The album takes its name from a shared idea of hope and resilience, while also referring to two Valiant station wagons owned by Nai Palm's late mother. 'One was white and one was black,' Nai Palm said, 'and depending on what mood she was in, she would drive one or the other. She was a single mother with six kids: If she drove the black one, you knew not to fuck with her.'

Nai Palm lost her mother to breast cancer at 11 years old. And in 2018, when on her way back to Melbourne from a solo US tour to record the final vocals for Mood Valiant, her own breast cancer diagnosis stopped her in her tracks. 'It was scary but also, once I bounced back from it, I had so much more emotional depth to play with in my delivery and intention...It was like extra fuel,' she said.

The first single to be released from the upcoming album was the bright and bouncy 'Get Sun', one of the tracks featuring cinematic string arrangements by Brazilian composer and arranger Arthur Verocai. The A-listed song gives a flavour of the South American influence that imprinted itself on the album from a precursory tour around Chile, Argentina and Brazil used to fund the studio visit with Verocai. 'It was the cherry on top of the cake of this very arduous album. You know? Let's finish it in Rio with one of our heroes,' Nai Palm said.

The phrase 'never meet your heroes' doesn't apply here, as Verocai blew the band away with his pre-written arrangements. 'We were just like kids in the candy store in the control room like… weeping' Nai Palm recalled. The engineer on shift let Hiatus Kaiyote stay late one evening, leading to the writing and tracking of moody and groove-locked single 'Red Room'.

'The fact that "Red Room" is a single is crazy to me... it was like a couple of passes at two in the morning. But it was a vibe. It wasn't even meant to me on the record,' Nai Palm admitted. Spontaneously recorded on the same night was 'Stone Or Lavender', a ballad showing the band's more vulnerable side, centring around Nai's powerful vocals and a lulling piano.

The South America trip concluded in a spell-binding visit to the Amazon, where Nai Palm was able to record the sounds of birds singing and personal encounters with indigenous women belonging to local tribes. These voice notes would end up being dispersed throughout the album and can be heard in tracks like 'Flight of the Tiger Lily' and 'Hush Rattle'.

Closing the album is 'Blood and Marrow', a track which started as a bassline by Bender that Nai Palm and Perrin improvised over. The bossanova-esque beat and echoey quality conjure up an image of the band playing from behind the depths of an Amazonian waterfall, perhaps the antithesis of the hospital ward where Nai Palm was recovering from her mastectomy only a few weeks before.

Writing and recording 'Blood and Marrow' was said to have been a foil for Nai Palm's own grief, something she is more than willing to share in hope it provides comfort to others. 'When people tell me they listen to my music when they're grieving, that is the highest compliment,' she said. 'I've listened to albums when I've been at my most vulnerable and so if you can be on the other side of the conversation and be offering that to people, it's really beautiful.'

In what is inherently a fragmented body of work, Mood Valiant embodies a relentless strength of spirit and highlights the band's profound connection to the natural world. 'I sound like a crazy esoteric witch right now, but nature and music, they are the fabric of life,' Nai said. '[Music] is ever-changing, evolving and adaptable. It makes me feel not so alone when I can be part of that… It is my purpose. So even if I go tomorrow, I know that I've tried to offer beauty to the world.'

Hiatus Kaiyote's album Mood Valiant comes out on Friday 25 June on Brainfeeder Records /Ninja Tune.