How apt that the KLAXONS should pop up again within a week of the launch of this year’s Mercury Prize, which is where many of us last remember seeing them (chewing their faces off on the winner’s podium in 2007).

At the Village Underground though, the gnawing is more in the back of their minds. After three years away, and several fraught recording sessions later (during which time they reportedly ditched a whole album) how will they pick up the threads of their previously dandy ‘career’?

Tonight, on first appearance, they look very sturdy; but look again and are they trying just a little too hard (to be loved?). Has the difficult experience of finishing this album left them a little scarred? It’s almost imperceptible but if you squint hard enough you can just about make out the chinks in their previously indestructible confidence.

This isn’t an easy gig mind you, here in this cavernous hipsters palace which oozes the WOW Factor (with the exception of a couple of hundred fans at the front, we are, in jolly media terms, a Warehouse Of Wankers).

The new songs – they start with ‘Flashover’ and pepper the set with tracks from the forthcoming album – sound like a brickwall on the record, but tonight, ironically in this unforgiving brick shed, they ricochet round the place losing some of their momentum.

As an album ‘Surfing The Void’, holds together surprisingly well (especially, I’m imagining, given the growing air of panic in the studio). It is certainly a more serious record. I think it’s also just about the most proggy album I’ve heard this year – at least lyrically.

The fascination with time and space is still there – which makes you wonder what they wrote about on the ‘ditched’ album? Did they attempt their concept work about King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable? Is that still to come?

By the time you get to track three though, the crushing noise of title song ‘Surfing The Void’ you can feel a weight pressing down on them, which sparks the subsequent desperate gulps for air which you find in ‘Valley Of the Calm Trees’.

They seem to have recreated the pressure they were under over the past two years on the record itself. It is a genuinely heavy and oppressive work at times; less nu-rave brevity and more old-school darkness.

The question is: how sympathetic are people going to be these obvious growing pains? And the demanding nature of an album, which, with one or two exceptions is quite an unrelenting record (and is possibly lacking in anthems). It is a progression, but a confusing one.

Back at the gig, new single ‘Echoes’, amazingly manages to evade the muddy mix and sounds better than it does on the radio.

And by the time they encore with ‘Atlantis To Interzone’, the scars are being hidden by an explosion of white light (which still doesn’t excuse my awful photos by the way).

I still don’t think it’ll be a breeze for them over the next few months (to utilise their space-race imagery, it’s like they’ve jettisoned their launch rockets ready for the long haul), but this was enough to rein in the nagging doubts for now.