Lilo’s Thelma & Louise moment

And it really does. The record has the same DNA as the band’s first two EPs but this time writ larger – the sounds are bigger, the lyrics more cinematic, the emotions hit harder.

Blood Ties hops genres and sees the traditionally indie-folk group explore new areas sonically. The album opens with the incredible “Crash the Car”, a deceptively delicate start that builds into a cacophonous rage. Buried in the song’s enjoyably furious lyrics (“My ears go numb on the Jubilee line / I hope he never gets to have another good time”) is a line that sums up the childhood friends’ writing process:

“I’m so angry, on behalf of you.”

“Our lives are quite intertwined,” Gardner says, “so our writing is about each other, or even for each other – our perspective on something that happened to the other person. ‘Crash the Car’ I wrote about something Helen went through. When you spend so much time together, you know my brain as much as I know yours.”

Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why there’s such a harmony to this collection of songs, despite the women often writing separately. “A few of the songs came into being because we went on a trip together to San Diego. And we drove to Las Vegas, we went to LA. It might have been the longest amount of time that we’d spent joined at the hip together.” Given that the pair have been friends since they were 11 years old, it must have been exciting to learn they had new frontiers of friendship still to be unlocked. “It was just amazing!” Christie beams at the memory of the trip. “I didn’t think about the UK. Or my relationship. Or my Master’s degree – that I then had to drop out of – the whole time. It was amazing!”

“A lot of the songs were written over a long period of time – they weren’t written as an album,” Helen explains, “so it was about taking puzzle pieces and putting them together to see if they fit.” That album-puzzling was a more literal process than you might expect. “This sounds really uncreative and cold and heartless, but we made a big graph. We had four sections of what we thought were the corners of our sound. One of them was called ‘Big Crashy Moody’ or something. One of them was ‘Driving Fast!’ They all sounded like Sims emotions.”

This efficient approach to album-plotting is perhaps a result of the limited time the group have to work on the lilo project. “It’s the time,” Helen says, “but it’s also the brain capacity. If you’ve just come home from work, tired, I’m not like, ‘Let me create something brilliant.’ I’m like, ‘Let me have a bath and try not to fall asleep in it,’” she laughs. Helen has two jobs: in a café and record store, and Christie works as a secondary school history teacher.

Did her students ever find out about lilo? “Yeah, it was very much hot gossip for a week! A boy in year ten came up to me and said, ‘I listened to your song, Miss – not my cup of tea.’ That’s probably the most honest criticism of our music that I’m ever going to get. And the most polite thing he’s ever said to me.”

The visuals for the record sit in the sun-soaked Americana of the group’s sound. The cover shows a vintage US muscle car, parked up on a desert road. The lyric video for Nevada features the same vehicle with the hood popped, as Gardner and Dixon – in matching white vests and blue jeans – tinker with it. “It’s like a Thelma and Louise-esque road trip. We really wanted to go to the desert, go to America, but obviously we couldn’t afford to do that. So it’s actually Alicante.” Not just in the visuals but the songs themselves, there’s real cinema to the landscape, which Christie acknowledges: “We love movies, and I love romanticising my own life as if I’m in a movie.”

In the years since they began making music, lilo have built up a roster of great bandmates, many of whom perform star turns on Blood Ties. Joe Taylor and Kitty Fitz are artists in their own right, but provide an amazing foundation throughout and will join the group on tour. They also made for great collaborators during the recording process. “We can just be weird and chaotic and have ideas. What we’ve made is very much a communal effort, a team effort with loads of different ideas that come from other people, and that feels really nice. The longer we’ve been a band for, the more confident we’ve got with ideas like different arrangements and trying things out. A huge thing I’ve learned from this album is it’s fine to try something out, it be bad, delete it, go back.”

Helen was responsible for the album’s string arrangements and orchestral sections, some of which won’t be fully realised live on the upcoming tour, but maybe further down the line if the opportunity comes about. “It would almost be a shame in our eyes to leap to close the book on things like that and just have them as a recorded thing.” Christie says: “I think it would be good to bring them to life in a live way, wouldn’t it? Even as just one show.”

At the end of the album, the same gut-punch heartbreak explored on “Crash the Car” is viewed through a gentler lens. On “Closing Time”, a softer, more reflective energy emerges. Christie tells me: “You’re reimagining – you’re speculating about how that relationship could have ended, if it had ended better. Then in between there’s lots of realising what you need, realising what you want, realising what you’re angry about. There’s a real letting go at the end of the album. It starts kicking and screaming and by the end it’s not quite ‘They all lived happily ever after’ but maybe it’s okay. I’m going to let go of this thing. Off it goes.”