The first time they floated the idea of appearing on their own album cover, Baird remembers the band's management saying: "Guys, this is amazing! We've been trying to get you to do this for so long! So it's a perfect disguise," he laughs. London-based photographer Aleksandra Kingo designed the sleeve, placing the trio in a scene of panic - surrounded by red alert alarms, megaphones, telephones and hazard signs.
It all ties in with the theme of False Alarm, which Trimble says is about a sense of collective, mild anxiety that many people experience today; where most of us live in a world of endless phone notifications, doom-ridden news headlines and general despair.
It can be a little bit anxiety-inducing. And that's where the name False Alarm came from, because most of it is needless. That's not to say there aren't pressing global issues to get worked up about, insists Baird. Sleeve designer Kingo was on the same page as the band when put to task on an album cover. We were introduced to it in our early teens. So it can still be very overwhelming to us. The last Two Door Cinema Club album, 's Gameshow, came off the back of inter-band tensions and a two year hiatus in which the Northern Irish group nearly split.
Lyrically, Trimble addressed his dissatisfaction with the information age from a distance. This time, Trimble and his bandmates are realising they're just as vulnerable to technology's perceived dark side as the rest of us. False Alarm, then, explores how humans are what Trimble calls a "very strange species.
We're quite foolish and we're quite self-destructive. But it's all happening in quite a funny way. Rather than pointing the finger at specific trends, or getting doom-and-gloom about the world we live in, the new record explores the "bizarre side of it and the absurdity," he says.
And the album's off-kilter social commentary is channelled through shiny, funk-nodding pop; already found on singles Talk and Satellite. False Alarm sees Two Door Cinema Club writing more astutely about the human condition than in their heady, jangle-indie early days. It's partly because they've become more comfortable with themselves as they approach their 30s - and partly because the spectre of self-implosion that preceded their previous album allowed them to hit the reset button.
Halliday says that while recording and touring Gameshow, they learned to "speak our minds and be assertive. Communication hadn't been their strong suit before then, but "it felt like the three of us finally had some sort of security," says Baird.
And the brinkmanship of those previous years gave them a new lease of life. We've been very lucky to have done this for 12 years. We've seen a lot of bands at the pinnacle, selling out the O2 Arena, and we've seen those kinds of bands disappear. That's something we're aware of, and it allows us to keep challenging ourselves and becoming better and better, without getting too comfortable with the way things are. Baird puts their longevity down to never quite being the coolest, most talked-about band - particularly in the days when guitar music was far from in vogue.
And that allowed us to slowly build up our fanbase and get to a level where we're pretty consistent now. So from the outside, there weren't a lot of people expecting much from us. Things came to a head when the band were forced to cancel a headline set at Latitude because Trimble was having a mental and physical meltdown.
I collapsed on the way over and the day after I arrived in London I was admitted to hospital and stayed there for two weeks.
So we decided to take a clean break until we were all prepared, if we were ever going to be prepared. For 18 months, Two Door Cinema Club went their very separate ways. Halliday settled in London to get married, play football and work on his DIY and culinary skills. He was saved from becoming the Ulster Howard Hughes by working on photography projects — his debut exhibition, Mustang Margaritas, collected pictures he had taken on a US road trip with Belfast photographer Jamie William — and a burgeoning interest in eastern religious and philosophical texts.
Withdrawals conquered, pavlovas perfected and third eyes squeegeed, the group reconvened in mid and found that they still had new doors to open. We wanted to have some fun and do something that was truly interesting. Bastille are your fault, right? Our second album is a perfect example. I still believe there are good songs on that record, but it was an incredibly safe record. Just as Beacon included real-life stories of psychedelic experiences at Mexican pyramids and fights with homeless people, the new album has a revealing autobiographical bent, detailing the industry machinations that forced them to go away to find themselves, and what they found there.
I let myself be moulded and it took me out of who I was. The single Are We Ready? My brain would be fried every single day because there would be so much information everywhere.
That worried me for a very long time and made me feel like a bit of an outcast, that I was doing something wrong. I discovered this term weltschmerz , the German word for being at odds with the world around you.
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