Youth Group are record-holders. Most people probably aren’t aware of it, but for a little Sydney indie band to hold the record as not just the first Australian artist, but the first EVER artist to hold the record as the first ever artist to top the download charts in Australia is quite the feat.

Of course, it was their ARIA-winning take on “Forever Young”, a beautiful rendition of the Alphaville track in which the Sydney four-piece made the song their own, that got them the record. It propelled the band’s third album, Casino Twilight Dogs, to the top of the charts as well, nestling inside the top ten upon its release in 2006.

Now, nearly two years later to the day, The Night is Ours is upon us. “We went into the studio in October last year,” outlines frontman Toby Martin, making the process sound so simple.

In reality, The Night is Ours had the most convoluted birth of any of Youth Group’s albums, with the band choosing not to work with regular producer Wayne Connolly but instead working on it independently. “It’s by far the longest,” he said of the time period from October 2007 to March 2008 that they spent making it, “and that was kind of the whole point. We really wanted to have a slow cooking kind of thing.

“We deliberately didn’t demo or rehearse much together before going into the studio,” he explains. “We worked on it song-by-song, so we’d arrange and write for the first couple of days, and then we’d record, and then have it all pretty much done. It made each song its own little project.”

Alongside with not working with their regular go-to guy in the studio, this process took the band outside of their comfort zone. “We wanted to do something different,” Toby says. “We were a little bit tired of doing the demo and then record process – we wanted to just make the recording the entire creative moment. So we needed a lot of time to do that, and we were also keen to have more of a go at producing it ourselves, and doing it somewhere that wasn’t necessarily a conventional studio.”

As such, Youth Group set up shop in an abadoned dock worker’s mess hall on Sydney Harbour. “It was a place we could really make our home for a few months,” he explains, “and it had a lot of character. It seeped into the record.”

Having not laid down any demo templates for what was to become The Night is Ours, Youth Group nevertheless had strong pre-existing preconceptions as to what the album was going to be by the time they came to record it.

“I had a strong sense in my head of what I wanted the record to be like,” Toby asserts. “I knew what song I wanted to open the record with, what song I wanted to be second, and what song I wanted to be last, and how I wanted the record to flow and what kind of feeling I hoped it would communicate. We were definitely striving for something that was in our heads.

“Often we’d record five reels of tape worth of one song,” he continues, “as we tried to get it right in terms of the feel that we were going for. We were guided with an overriding principal; definitely more so than Casino Twilight Dogs, which I think was more just 11 songs that we really liked. I think this is more of an album.”

Does this make it a more conceptual release than anything Youth Group have done before?

“It’s not conceptual,” Toby assures. “In terms of the lyrics, it’s just things that I’ve written about that have happened in the last year of my life – there’s no ‘concept album’ sense to them. It’s just stuff I was thinking about. But we all wanted something that was a little more on the intense, moody side of the Youth Group spectrum. We were always searching for that, and often it meant that we didn’t play as two guitars, bass and drum kind of thing – some songs I didn’t play guitar at all.”

A good example of this might be first single “Two Sides”, with its dark synth tones and overarching 80s vibe.

“It had an interesting genesis,” he says of the first cut lifted from the album. “I wrote it as a 50s doo-wop song as a bit of a stoned joke, and then Youth Group did it, and it became this indie dance song, and then in the studio it became this 80s angular sort of thing. I was just playing these two really simple chords on guitar and then Cameron [Emerson-Elliot, regular Youth Group guitarist] started playing keyboards along with it, and it sounded good.”

Youth Group’s The Night Is Ours is out now, with the band undertaking a national tour accordingly.