A vicious, snarling burst of punk rock fuelled by experimentation and general ill sentiments, the Snowman of 2008 is a far cry from that heard on the band’s debut self-titled album released two years previous.

On their new album, The Horse, The Rat And The Swan, Snowman have abandoned the pop hooks that made songs like “You Are a Casino” stand out – instead, they’re going for a more experimental approach in their sound. It’s a marked difference for the Perth-based four-piece, and one that co-frontman Joe explains was entire deliberate.

“I think that’s probably the case. I think we wanted to get away from relying on tired old clichés – we wanted to get away from ‘rock music’, I think. Even though it’s still guitar-based, we wanted to put obstacles in the way so that there were different paths to get to where we are musically. It’s turned out that it’s got this human element, but this mechanical element – this tribal machine-like sound emerged.”

There’s definitely less of a focus on traditional ‘song’ structures on The Horse, The Rat And The Swan – grooves and rhythmic patterns dominate the sound.

“It’s a reaction to that first record,” he confirms of their approach. “We wanted to restrain ourselves – we didn’t want to throw everything in, and we wanted to make something that wasn’t pointless.”

So no more pop songs?

“Riffs, chord progressions that are familiar, I didn’t feel like doing it this time,” Joe elaborates. “It was a challenge to hear something new and to feel something different – the textures and sounds and colours in my head didn’t get translated into pop but instead were translated into rhythmic pieces, and atonal, discordant things. The subject matter we were dealing with felt like it was right to communicate that.”

Lots of blood and guts.

“No,” he counters. “It’s bleak, but it’s not violent – there’s fear and paranoia about this barrage of visions that we get from all sorts of media sources about the apocalypse and how you see through these things. I immersed myself in that, and became consumed by all that nonsense, and it’s real but bizarrely sort of unreal at the same time. When you immerse yourself in it you get engulfed by it, and that’s what happens I suppose.”

Joe’s obsessions were fuelled by reading on the road whilst touring and then afterwards, when they were home for the following six months before beginning making their second record. Instead of gallivanting about, Joe holed up at home, writing and reading and writing more, and that period found him hitting a wall – everything lead up to the sound that the band created for The Horse, The Rat And The Swan, where everything fell apart and then was put back together again.

Almost like reconstruction through deconstruction.

“That’s what happened,” he says. “We did deconstruct things – instead of adding things to the songs to make them pieces of music we took things away to make them more stark and therefore impactful. It’s that thing where if you’re standing in a field with thousands of people you feel comfortable; if you stand there by yourself it’s far more a significant experience.

“We wanted to take away all the sounds,” Joe continues, “in order to leave you with all these important sounds, which I think is what we were trying to do.”

Snowman finished recording the album in January, but it’s not the sort of album that can be promoted in the traditional way, with singles, and hype, and the traditional structure of a pre-release – but that’s because it’s not a traditional album.

“I guess we’re not a band that people like to hype,” he shrugs.

Recorded with Dave Parkin in the sunny climes of Perth, financial constraints unfortunately limited the group to not go away and record the album in some place like Berlin, where the sounds of The Horse, The Rat And The Swan would sound like they came from. You can hear elements of influence from the likes of krautrock, Einsterzende Neubeuten, Eno-era Bowie, and even Liars filtering through on this album.

“We did tour with them,” he says of the latter group, ‘and we certainly had some admiration for them, but it felt like a very pure place in terms of where this came from.”

Snowman’s The Horse, The Rat And The Swan is out now, with the band touring accordingly.