My profile of Wild Beasts for last week&amp;#8217;s NME:

By the end of 2011, Wild Beasts were broken men. They had been touring &lsquo;Smother&rsquo; for six solid months without a break &ndash; it was their third album in four years, each made in great haste to sustain momentum after their slow beginnings. The end was in sight in Istanbul, just under a week before the serious touring would be over for a while. After the show, the four Beasts painted the town red, and then green, the night playing out like one of the less elegant scenes from their bawdy second album, &lsquo;Two Dancers&rsquo;.

&ldquo;I got horrendously drunk,&rdquo; says co-frontman Hayden Thorpe, working an interesting look of ribbed thermals and immaculately slicked-back hair in an upmarket Deptford caf&eacute; in mid-January. &ldquo;Got lost, pissed in the street, all sorts. Vomited on the way back to the hotel, vomited all the way back to London, then got home and was like&hellip; what was that? What has become!&rdquo;

What could have amounted to a day of Netflix and fried eggs actually led to a moment of sudden calm that he hadn&rsquo;t experienced for years. &ldquo;You have those really rare, fleeting moments of clarity in life,&rdquo; he says, sitting next to guitarist Ben Little. &ldquo;You feel this sense of wellbeing that&rsquo;s gone again in an instant; you&rsquo;re always drawing it from memory &ndash; you can never see it full in the face.&rdquo;

&lsquo;Smother&rsquo; was essentially about how touring &lsquo;Two Dancers&rsquo; ruined their relationships and lives, which inevitably became a &ldquo;claustrophobic world&rdquo; to live in. With the memory of that album consigned to the gutters of Istanbul, over the next few days Hayden developed the idea for a song called &lsquo;Pregnant Pause&rsquo;, an early first step towards Wild Beasts&rsquo; fourth record. But before the band went anywhere near a studio, they took eight months off to decompress at home in north London, rehabilitating their broken lives and only seeing each other for odd social occasions. After the reassuring, hard-won success of &lsquo;Smother&rsquo;, it was the first time they had ever been able to take a break and contemplate the band&rsquo;s existence. The hiatus proved valuable.

&ldquo;I think we rediscovered our innocence,&rdquo; says Hayden of the mood that informed &lsquo;Present Tense&rsquo;, Wild Beasts&rsquo; superb new album, which was partially recorded down the road in a railway arch studio. &ldquo;We rediscovered each other in a way. It feels like all the other records are a big intake of breath and this is a final, long exhale.&rdquo;

The week before our Deptford meeting, Wild Beasts received a not entirely welcome reminder of the relative level of fame that &lsquo;Smother&rsquo; brought them. &ldquo;Wild Beasts take swipe at British bands who sing with US accents&rdquo;, 