Yacht Rock might be the gateway for hipsters to indulge a secret fetish for soft rock, but Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian of the Turin Brakes aren't so insecure. They wear their passion for the smooth sounds and groovy catatonia of the Have A Nice Day decade right on their sleeves.

“It appealed to me when I was a teenager,” admits Knights, speaking to the Straight from his home in London, England. “It was completely the wrong decade, but it sounds so damn good. I've actually been trying to get my kids into Steely Dan.”

The 33-year-old guitarist-vocalist considers the era “a peak”, although it's already patently bloody obvious if you've heard Turin Brakes' fifth and latest album, Outbursts. A firm if somewhat late contender for 1975's album-of-the-year Grammy, Outbursts suggests Elton John doing Nick Drake with tracks like “Embryos”, or Yes with all the edges removed in the lovely waltz “Apocolips”. There's even a little England Dan & John Ford Coley creeping into “Radio Silence”, while another standout track, “The Letting Down”, is a campy ragtime number somewhere in the region of—Bingo!—Mama Cass doing “Dream a Little Dream of Me”.

“Yes!” exclaims the vocalist. “Oh man, I used to listen to that version of that song on vinyl, just over and over again. I literally used to sing that song all day long.”

Knights says “The Letting Down” tackles the “feeling of being a letdown, of not being able to rise to the heights that other people thought you could.” Which has some significance for both him and Paridjanian. Turin Brakes was intimately attached to one of the U.K. media's periodic adventures in pulling an entire scene out of its ass, when its 2001 debut The Optimist LP was hailed as a vanguard symbol of the “new acoustic movement”. Since then, it's been unfocused records—or “mindless progression” in Knights' words—and diminishing returns for Turin Brakes, not to mention increasing hostility from the same press that touted it to begin with.

“We're the first to say we're rubbish in terms of rock 'n' roll frontmen,” chuckles Knights. “And the British press didn't like it. Us as people? Who cares? It's much more about the sounds coming off the records. I could elaborate forever but that sums it up in a very basic way.”

Added to that was the pressure of following The Optimist LP.

“It's very hard to move on when everyone says your first album is a classic,” he says. “It's like, ”˜Well, what the hell are you ever gonna do after that?'”

Nine years later, it seems that Turin Brakes has found the answer. One listen to the sweeping, majestic folk rock of opener “Sea Change” is enough to know that the band is out of the wilderness. Knights is justifiably proud of the song, even if he underestimates just how many winners he and Paridjanian have stuffed into Outbursts.

“It was a big track, and really the key to the record,” he says. “And I'm just glad there was one of them. I mean, hell, you'd like five but one will do.”

Turin Brakes plays Venue on Sunday (May 9).