As far as duos go, The Proper Ornaments have every base covered. If differences are as important as similarities, James Hoare (Ultimate Painting, Veronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold (Toy) are what strawberries are to cream, what cheese is to a biscuit and so on.

The pair began writing their sophomore album at the beginning of last year, following the release of their 2014 debut album Wooden Head. Hoare explains that this process is usually rather methodical – you write the song and then record the song – but they momentarily fell victim to the supposed curse of the sophomore record. They went to a studio in Hackney, then re-recorded the material at Hoare’s home studio and ran into trouble with a broken 8-track machine. But in true Proper Ornaments fashion, this was divine intervention. Without said obstacles, their second LP Foxhole wouldn’t be laced in lilting nuances and haunting, remote simplicity. They played quietly and were more thoughtful. They arranged tracks to allow for more time within the song and between songs for an album with timeless quality.

Clementine Zawadzki: You’re probably one of few bands with a truly interesting ‘how we met’ story…
James Hoare: If anything it’s probably crazier than what we put down. Max was going out with this girl who was a kleptomaniac and she was addicted to shoplifting and I worked in a record shop and they had a clothes shop as well, a women’s vintage clothes shop. They both came in and she got him to distract me so she could steal some expensive boots and I was reading a book on The Velvet Underground and he’d just moved to London and was interested in starting a band. I wasn’t instantly like, ‘this guy’s really cool,’ I actually thought, ‘this guy’s a bit weird,’ he seemed like an interesting character, then we spoke about music and I could see we had a lot of shared interests. I hadn’t been playing in a band for a little while, like six months to a year, so I agreed to meet up with him just a couple of days later. I had no idea what to expect but then after we met up we quite quickly we became good friends and have been ever since. It’s not how I normally meet people, but it goes to show, sometimes you’ve just got to… Max is one of those characters that draws people to him, so I meet pretty interesting people through him in weird circumstances or make connections in strange ways.

“Max was going out with this girl who was a kleptomaniac, and I worked in a record shop that also sold women’s vintage clothes. They both came in and she got him to distract me so she could steal some expensive boots.”

CZ: How do you and Max piece a song together?
JH: Each of us will write the basic melody and the lyrics, but we’ll do the whole arrangement together. There’s a few tracks on the record where Max wrote a verse and then I wrote a middle eight. It can vary from co-writing to the other person completely changing the direction of a fully formed idea. We don’t go to a practice space and work them out with everyone playing. You just play it at home on a guitar, so you never know how it’s going to sound. So on a few songs we changed the tempo quite a bit, so that’s how we realised this record had a soft melodic sound, because we’d bring more and more tracks back to that.

CZ: Your songs take a look at the overlooked and isolated. In a weird way, is it easier to draw on those things when you’re writing?
JH: Yeah, in a way it is, because often the things that you maybe have more emotions or thoughts about, there’s introspection. If you’re going walking out in the sun and having a great day, you wouldn’t come home – at least me and Max – and write a song about that. But when you’re going over things in your mind and searching for certain things, that’s when you’re more likely to write about it.

“After listening to solo John Lennon records and music that’s stripped down and sparse and quite emotional, I’d say it was a conscious effort to move in that direction.”

CZ: This album feels calmer and less instrumentally distorted compared to your debut. What sparked that sonic departure?
JH: The idea was to have an album that works together and all the tracks lead on to one another and you can listen to it as a whole thing, as opposed to a collection of upbeat songs that could be more obvious singles. It’s more of a mellow mood. I think maybe it’s even a reaction against how people listen to music now. A lot of the music we’re influenced by came from that era of listening to an album in its entirety.

CZ: You guys are also fans of the juxtaposition between melancholy lyrics with a more upbeat melody…
JH: Yeah, that Phil Spector kind of thing, definitely. It’s something we’ve tapped into from listening to that music so much in the past. I had a piano for a while, but I think if you’ve been playing guitar for a while it’s a refreshing way to start writing, because you go about things a different way if you’re playing chords. You’re freed from the guitar neck and also the piano lends itself to more melancholic and melodic music. After listening to solo John Lennon records and music that’s stripped down and sparse and quite emotional, I’d say it was a conscious effort to move in that direction.

CZ: What were some other influences for Foxhole?
JH: I think both me and Max were watching some David Lynch films and I know that we both watch documentaries about the turn of the century, like the first World War, maybe that’s where Foxhole comes from? We’re very interested in different elements of the past and I think that plays into how we wanted to create something that was slower and went against the internet. We’re not trying to be a retro band, we listen to new music as well, but it’s looking back to our own childhood, but also a time much earlier as well. Often you don’t realise what you’re consuming, they all seem like quite disparate sources, but you could go to a gallery for an exhibition and it has an impact on something else. In one way or another those things can show themselves in the music somewhere.

CZ: What does it mean for the pinch wheel on the 8-track machine to be broken – how did this effect recording and the result of the recordings?
JH: We were in the studio and on a tape machine, the pinch wheel is the rubber tape that it goes through and that meant the speed of the song was fluctuating. As it turns out, that was maybe for the best, because the takes that we had from the studio that worked we didn’t end up using anyway. The recordings from my house sounded more intimate and we preferred the atmosphere. It’s a happy accident. If that hadn’t happened, we might’ve carried on recording in the studio.

CZ: How important is atmosphere to you in the process?
JH: You sometimes know in the playback, but often you know where you are just by the end of the first day. It does make a big difference, that’s why an English band might go to the West Coast because they want the Californian sun to give the record some warmth, or like Blur recorded one of their records in Iceland because they wanted a very precise or cold sound to it, so it has a big effect.

CZ: How important is it to you guys to be very hands-on with your music?
JH: With Foxhole, I took care of the recording side of things and made sure we have everything we needed, and I was on tour with my other band, so Max did the artwork. I think we always like to be in control because then you can’t blame anyone else when things don’t go the way you want them to go. If you have a middleman it can take a lot longer when you’re sending emails going, “a bit more like this or that,” and you might geographically be in different places too, but eventually you get there. It’s great if you have the capability to do it yourself.

The Proper Ornaments ‘Foxhole’ is out on 20th January 2017 via Tough Love Records.