It’s no wonder that Belle and Sebastian is held so dear by its fans—the band has quietly thrived for the past two decades, scoring multiple U.K. chart hits and winning an assortment of music awards. Beyond that, putting on a Belle and Sebastian record has always felt like opening up a scrapbook painstakingly handmade for you.

Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance may be the Scots’ ninth studio album since their 1996 debut, Tigermilk (often dubbed the band’s magnum opus), but it still has a deeply personal feel. Its vinyl-warm sound and filmic melancholy, painted by frontman Stuart Murdoch’s famously clever lyrics, bring to mind the work of the classic confessional songwriters of the ’60s and ’70s.

But, as the title hints, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance veers onto a less-travelled path for Belle and Sebastian, bubbling with a surprising surge of electronic effervescence on upbeat disco and dance-pop tracks like “The Party Line” and “Enter Sylvia Plath”.

“In the past, there were times where I tried to shoehorn an electronic sound into songs where it didn’t work or the rest of the band weren’t ready for it,” says keyboardist and founding member Chris Geddes, on the line from his home studio in Glasgow. “But lately Stevie [Jackson] has been playing in a disco covers band, Richard [Colburn] has been playing a lot of dance music in his DJ sets, and I’ve been doing some studio projects that are more computer-based. So when we got together to work on the album, we were all sort of in the same space.”

Citing vintage disco and Krautrock, plus modern artists Caribou, Boards of Canada, and Four Tet, as influences, Geddes then points to the Beatles as an unlikely electronic reference, praising their groundbreaking, subtle use of synthesizers on Abbey Road. Geddes also has a penchant for watching YouTube videos of anonymous musicians playing obscure synths; that’s better for learning how the instruments work than listening to electronic albums.

“A lot of our favourite records have been made by anonymous studio musicians like the Wrecking Crew, who played with the Mamas & the Papas and the Beach Boys,” says Geddes. “Classic pop, Motown, and soul in general has been a constant source of inspiration, even though we may not overtly sound like that. With Motown, the way that the bands layer up sounds­—piano, organ, and percussion—was always inspiring, as well as the nonflashy playing. It’s all about the songs, not about putting the musicians in the foreground.”

This music-first mentality has been Belle and Sebastian’s approach from the beginning, and although the band has evolved drastically since its inception, that resolution remains firmly intact.

“The fans really are people just like ourselves, and I feel like we’ve gone through a lot with them,” says Geddes. “But I think there is a section of them who are a little annoyed at the direction our songs have gone in since the early 2000s, who wish that we had kept things more intimate, in the vein of our early records. The newer stuff is more pop-based because, as we’ve gotten older, the band has been drawn to more accessible sounds. But the majority of fans have been accepting of our moving forward and have kept with us through it.

“Being career musicians is all that we’ve ever hoped for, and that we’ll always have an audience,” he adds. “We only ever really talk about the next project. And you hope that there will always be a next project. But we’re all quite happy to just be able to keep playing our instruments.”

Belle and Sebastian plays the Vogue Theatre next Wednesday (April 8).