IF THERE’S ever been a band who prove the inverse relationship between quantity and quality it’s Teenage Fanclub. New album Here may only be their fourth album in 16 years, but like Howdy! (2000), Man-Made (2005) and Shadows (2010), it’s that rare sort of record you know you’ll still be listening to in a few years’ time – at least until the next Teenage Fanclub record is out, which, given the six-year gap between Here and Shadows, will be 2022.

“Who knows if there will be another record after this,” says Norman Blake, trawling the supermarkets of North Lanarkshire for fresh oregano for a recipe he wants to make his parents.

“First world problems – looking for oregano,” he laughs, dodging into Sainsbury’s.

“We get together when we feel we have good enough songs to bring to each other. If that happens again, great. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too. We’ve never had a grand plan or big vision. But we’re really pleased with this record, so if it does turn out to be our last, at least we’ve not left people with a duffer.”

Blake – who now spends his time between Waterloo, Ontario (home, he notes, of the BlackBerry), and Bellshill, where Teenage Fanclub formed in 1989 – is one of the band’s three principal songwriters along with Gerard Love and Raymond McGingley.

We’ve had to postphone our phone chat a little so Blake can keep up with that afternoon’s English Premier League fixtures.

“Oh goodness, don’t ask,” he says, when I wonder how things went.

While never assuming the populist brashness of, say Oasis (whose Liam Gallagher once said the Fanclub were “the second-best band in the world” – second to Oasis, of course), their unassuming, everyman personal appeal has always been matched with output that, though not revolutionary, is doughty, solid and always enjoyable.

From the lazy skronk of early Creation single The Concept (1991), to 1995 whistle-along Mellow Doubt, to the blissful harmonies of I Need Direction (2000) and the smitten Baby Lee from last album Shadows, Teenage Fanclub tracks are fuelled by a gentle empathy and a simple commitment to pop.

With songs that lodge themselves into your heart on just one listen, it’s no surprise that a clutch of UK dates early this month were long sold-out, as are their Glasgow dates in December. Here’s hoping they schedule more soon.

Here, like previous albums, sees the band offer four songs by each of the songwriters. An exercise in the virtues of democracy, it’s a formula, Blake notes, that has always worked for the band, and they’re loathe to change it now. And with records as unarguably good as Here, why on earth would they?

Recorded over the last 18 months with regular drummer Francis Macdonald and keyboard player Dave McGowan, it was worked on at a studio in rural Provence and McGinley’s home in Glasgow before being mixed at Clouds Hill studios in Hamburg. Long-serving soundman David Henderson also appears, as does fiddler John McCusker whose delicate, mellifluous strings cushion The Darkest Part of The Night, one of Blake’s offerings.

If 2005’s Man-Made had an undertow of discomfort, as though the very real responsibilities and losses of approaching middle age threatened to send them off-course, Here is more magnanimous and philosophical, it’s central theme being one of living – to use the title of another of Blake’s songs – In The Moment.

“None of us are getting any younger, of course,” he offers, after saying how the strong, purifying wind of the mistral seemed to foster a sense of telepathy between them during their time in Provence. “It’s natural that your thoughts turn to issues around mortality. We’ve always written about what we know. And as you get older, it’s important to appreciate what you have.”

Here is released on 9 September.

Teenage Fanclub play Edinburgh Liquid Rooms on September 6 (sold out), Inverness Ironworks on November 15, Glasgow Barrowland on December 3 (sold out) and Glasgow ABC on December 4 (sold out). Www.teenagefanclub.com