Some groups achieve overnight success. Others have to wait decades before they find their audience. Texan rockers Spoon fall firmly into the latter category.

Seven albums into their career, they can finally fill venues like New York's Radio City Hall in the States, but remain relatively unknown in the UK.

Despite their anonymity, the band were declared the "best-reviewed act of the 2000s" by US website Metacritic last December, after its editors compared a decade of critical opinions on more than 7,000 albums.

Spoon's latest release, Transference, came out shortly afterwards, with frontman Britt Daniel describing it as an "uglier record" than its predecessors.

Largely ditching the straightforward, melodical approach of their previous work, it focuses on atmospheric grooves, cut-up vocals and austere, moody soundscapes.

Nonetheless, it has seen the band retain their reputation for critical consistency.

It gave the quartet their first top five chart placing in the US - and has brought the group greater attention in the UK, where such acoustic experimentation is more warmly welcomed by rock fans.

"It does seem like there's more going on here, for once" says Daniel drily.

"Maybe people want to hear more of that experimental thing right now, or it could be the back catalogue catching up with people.

"There's a case to be made that people want to hear stuff that blows their minds."

Transference is certainly a headphones record, drawing you into its sonic universe with the textured, rhythmic opener Before Destruction, before veering off into spiky garage pop on The Mystery Zone and raging, bitter anger on the piano-pounding single Written In Reverse.

Many of the songs are based around demos Daniel recorded "in the basement", and retain a scratchy lo-fi immediacy that is generally missing from big rock records.

"Sometimes it's hard to beat those first, spontaneous takes," Daniel says.

"We used to take the demos into the studio and try to reconstruct them, but there's an awareness that you never really can capture it the same way again."

"Are we incapable of making a bad album Probably not, but I don't want to find out"

However, he concedes, there was a "a long-standing war" between the band and their producer, Mike McCarthy, about how much of the demos they could use.

"Mike is an engineer and a producer at the same time and he probably wanted the fidelity to be as good as possible," Daniel explains - before adding "and he probably wanted to give himself something to do".

Broken deal

Spoon were formed in 1993 by Daniels and drummer Jim Eno. The name came from a song by German artrock outfit Can.

"If I'd known I was going to be in a band for more than 18 months I wouldn't have called it that," the singer deadpans, 17 years later.

They spent a decade on the brink of breaking into the mainstream, including a disastrous stint with major label Elektra - who got cold feet and dropped the band after just one album.

It was, curiously, teen drama The OC which gave the quartet a much-needed boost, after nabbing the ragged funk of The Way We Get By to soundtrack one of its more affecting will they / won't they romantic liaisons.

That kickstarted the band's decade-long run as critical darlings - something which Daniel finds vaguely amusing.

"Are we incapable of making a bad album Probably not, but I don't want to find out," he muses.

"I don't think we've made any particularly bad records, but I don't particularly like listening to our first one.

"We played some of the songs from it on tour a couple of years ago, but they seemed to be about as well-received as the first time around."

'Goofy'

There is a sardonic, self-deprecating tone to the 38-year-old's conversation.

He is reluctant to talk at length, as though he's afraid he'll run out of words. Certain questions are (politely) dismissed out of hand.

"Why is this album moody" he responds to one line of inquiry. "Maybe I was just feeling moody."

In part, the singer is wary of falling into cliche. When he momentarily forgets himself and mentions "the spirit of rock'n'roll", Daniel pauses, reassesses and dismisses his comments as "goofy".

Similarly, when recording the video for Written In Reverse, the star went to great lengths to avoid hackneyed rock conventions.

"Lip-syncing is like acting, and I'm no good at that," he explains. "We wanted something spontaneous."

The video doesn't quite sidestep cliche (it's recorded in "authentic" black and white, for one) but it does perfectly capture the rolling, rickety groove the band have mastered on their seventh album.

"I came up with a bunch of songs that got on something and stayed on it," Daniels explains, "rather than trying to make their mark with a bunch of fancy chords and little bit parts".

"It's a sort of song we hadn't really tried too much of before and I wanted to see if we could pull it off."

And did they succeed

"Yes, I think we pulled it off."

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