“When I didn’t enjoy touring, it was a combination of everything. The fact that you’re touring, playing five, six nights a week – sometimes you’ve been doing that for two years, it can’t be great always, you can’t be excited by that all the time.”

Craig Nicholls is sitting in Sony’s Sydney offices, where he has spent the day conducting interviews with various media outlets. This is his last of the day, before hopping a plane to Melbourne to begin again. The Vines have been busy of late, popping up and causing a near-riot at Sydney Central Station last week, when they performed a short acoustic set as part of Channel [V]’s series of guerrilla gigs. This Thursday the band are to play the Russian Standard Vodka Live At The Chapel series. It’s a full promotional schedule and one that shows no signs of letting up once The Vines’ fifth record Future Primitive hits stores. None of this is particularly disconcerting to Nicholls, who seems to be looking forward to the prospect of prolonged touring.

“It’s been OK, I’m feeling pretty good about it. I’m just happy that we’ve got an album coming out, it makes sense to talk about it, and there seems to be people interested in it, which is good,” he says.

“At this point we’re not going to be touring for a year and a half solid. We’ll definitely be touring and going overseas, but I enjoy it. I definitely enjoy doing it. I wouldn’t go through all the other stuff if I didn’t get a buzz out of playing live.”

Future Primitive is the least traditonally Vines-sounding album the band have released to date, a necessity at this juncture in the band’s career. Nicholls likens the shift to the ever-morphing career of Primal Scream, a band who flirt with different genres. Much of album number five’s sound lies in the space-age production of Chris Colonna of electro-pop act Bumblebeez; there are drum machines, glitchy edits and an overriding use of flange, delay pedals and numerous unrecognisable elements. When Nicholls described the effort as being “spacey sounding” in an interview with TMN a few months ago, he succinctly summed up the production style.

“It’s different working with Chris, that’s why we did it with him, he comes from a different world,” he explains.

There are numerous artistic left- turns too, all of which pay dividends; the touching Goodbye with its acoustic guitar and sweet sentiment is a highlight, and the most candid moment in The Vines’ catalogue since a possessed Nicholls wailed “I’m a seed of a man” at the conclusion of debut album Highly Evolved.

Likewise, new ground is broken with the tripped out sound collage Intro, the baggy swagger of closer S.T.W and the epic, harmony-drenched All That You Do (Nicholls’ favourite song on the album at the moment).

As a whole, the album is their most varied and experimental, but also their most ‘pop’ release. Two songs in particular, Candy Flipping Girl and Cry are among the most radio friendly songs Nicholls has penned to date, a sentiment he agrees with.

“I really like those songs. But I can never tell what will work. With Get Free, to me that song never stood out. The record label or whoever said ‘this should be the first single’, so with this album it’s hard for me – the feedback I have been getting hasn’t suggested ‘this is the song’, it’s always different songs, which is quite good.”

The combination of a new label and renewed interest in the band has spurred Nicholls on to the point where he is thinking ahead to the next record.

“I’m hoping we can actually get a new album out next year now that we have a new label,” Nicholls ethuses. “There’s a studio downstairs here [at Sydney’s Sony offices] and it’s really cool. We’ve recorded some songs in there, so we want to go back and do some more. I’ve already written two or three songs I like for the next album.

This isn’t surprising. According to Nicholls, there are between 200 and 300 recorded compositions that may never see the light of day (although he has recently been entertaining the idea of releasing a collection of these home demos at some stage). “Aside from the band, I do have a side project, I record songs and then don’t really play them to anyone,” he laughs. “It’s just for me,” he qualifies.

Songwriting is a topic that seemingly engulfs Nicholls. He confesses to not being interested in guitars per se (perhaps explanation for his shabby onstage treatment of many unfortunate axes in the past), telling a story of being roused upon by Highly Evolved-producer Rob Schnapf for referring to a guitar as ‘a tool’ rather than ‘an instrument.’

“What I do mainly is write songs for the band, and then when I am having some time off from that, I just write songs...for nothing.” He laughs, realising he has effectively listed the same thing for ‘hobby’ as ‘occupation.’

“At this stage, with The Vines, if we want to do more dance music, we could probably do that in the band,” Nicholls continues. “There have been radical chances within bands, and I’ve never really felt the need to stick to one thing.”

Future Primitive is out June 3 through Sony Music Russian Standard Vodka Live At The Chapel takes place May 26 and will be aired on Go! on June 12.