Young Knives won’t want to admit it, but the English three-piece are part of a vanguard of British music that’s emerging – and it’s one that’s been heard before.

Like fellow trio the Wombats, Young Knives harkens back to the halcyon days of Britpop, when Oasis and Blur ruled the charts, when Elastica were conquering America, and when Pulp were (relatively) happy. That’s right: they’re a pop band, first and foremost.

“Maybe musically there are certain bands that we share something in common with,” says bassist House really rather vaguely. “I mean, I certainly notice that when we’re playing with other bands that a lot of bands from the UK tend to be from London and they all know each other – and we’ve never got involved with that because we live in Oxford. We don’t really hang around with other bands.”

Oxford itself has a fine catalogue of bands from the mid-1990s too – not just artistic genii Radiohead, but also the sublime pop stylings of Supergrass. “They’re awesome,” he agrees, with Young Knives due to play with Supergrass (“We’re somewhere way down the bill”) in Oxford in the not-too-distant future.

“We were all fans of Blur when their first few albums came out,” he explains, “and there’s definitely some of the influence of that.”

There’s certainly something of the influence of Blur and Supergrass – and, thus, the Kinks – in the style of the Young Knives, with pop melodies colliding with dark lyrics from frontman Henry Dartnell.  The macabre chorus of “Counters” – “Sitting on the front seat / Turning on the motor / Sucking on the hosepipe / Keep it turning over” – is hidden beneath a swathe of melody.

“We’re always drawn toward dark humour,” House says. “There seems to be so many bands that write songs about going to a disco and eyeing up some girl or something, and I don’t care! I don’t care if the boy in the band fancies a girl. If the song is about something a bit more sinister – on the last album we had a song about people making a collage of dead people’s faces from newspapers. That to me is something a bit more intriguing than someone fancying some girl, and he doesn’t know whether to speak to her or not.”

The Young Knives are also set to record a new version of the forthcoming single “Turntale” live to vinyl, like how they did it in the 1950s – everyone will stand around the mic and it’ll be cut straight to wax. It’s positively old-fashioned.

“Apparently nobody’s done it for years and years,” House declares, “and someone from our record label got into a conversation with some guy from a mastering place, and he really wanted to do it, and they asked us and we said ‘that sounds good’!”

With only one day off in the middle of touring coming straight on the back of recording the album, the band were literally heading to the studio to stand around and record “Turntale” all over again.

“As far as I know we’re doing it with acoustic guitars and drums, and you sort the levels by people standing closer or further away to the microphones – that’s how they did it originally so I guess we’ll just do that.”

It sounds like the aspect of recording this way would be even more labour-intensive than when in the studio recording the actual track. It’s sure to be something interesting. Vinyl remains a big part of Young Knives existence, he insists, despite the new album not coming on vinyl

“I don’t think anybody really buys it that much anymore – apart from collectors,” House says. “It was just too expensive to do really, and we spent quite a lot on doing the CD and a DVD to go with it, so all our singles come out on vinyl and we try and do three different versions of the single with different b-sides, for collectors.

Young Knives’ Supernature is out now on thick plastic of CD and digital files. But not, at this stage, 180g vinyl. Well, not yet…