THERE’S procrastination, and there’s putting something off for seven years – the time between Strike The Colours recording their third album Flock, and its release at the end of this month.

But the time-lag was not due to fear or apathy on the part of frontwoman Jenny Reeve and bandmates Davey McAulay, Graeme Smillie and Jonny Scott. All key players on the Scottish music landscape, the four have simply struggled to find an appropriate time to support such a release, touring and recording with the likes of Chvrches (Scott), Emma Pollock and Karine Polwart (Smillie), and Kenny Anderson (McAulay).

Reeve founded the band in the mid-2000s primarily as a vessel for her own songwriting, having previously lent her ethereal vocals and emotive violin to Arab Strap and Malcolm Middleton. Since the recording of Flock back in 2011 – the follow-up to 2009 album Seven Roads – the Glasgow-based musician has featured in award-winning film Where You’re Meant To Be alongside Aidan Moffat and late folk legend Sheila Stewart.

She’s also been back on the road with Middleton and Moffat’s reunited Arab Strap and Bdy_Prts, her slanted, hip hop-flavoured duo with Jill O’Sullivan.

“Jill and I knew we just had to make that Bdy-Prts record,” Reeve says, referring to last year’s Fly Invisible Hero, which was mixed at Chem19 by master engineer Paul Savage. “After that came out, things finally calmed down a little and this is the first year I’ve had the headspace to say: ‘Right, now is the time to do this.’”

The release of Flock had to happen to allow the band to move on, says Reeve.

“There’s definitely a psychological shift that happens when you release an album,” she says. “Whatever it does, it’s a snapshot of a moment in time. And then you can move freely into the next stage, whatever that is.”

With its themes of flight and escape, Flock was written during a time Reeve felt constrained by her own inner doubts.

“I was going through a strange period of time, a bad patch,” she says, gently prising her cat’s claws from her woolly jumper. “I was frustrated that I couldn’t deal with things that were holding me back and feeling really trapped and lost in a lot of ways. I had reached a point where I didn’t know what was up.”

Recorded by Savage during a two-week stint during the summer of 2011 at Wales’s Monnow Valley Studios – the rehearsal facility of Rockfield Studios, where Queen recorded Bohemian Rhapsody – Flock is often tumultuous, with intricate melody lines winding around Smillie and Scott’s dynamic rhythm section. Upbeat, almost poppier tracks such as stand-out Aces contrast with the almost proggy turbulence of the likes of Old Oak Tree and Branches, which counterpoints ferocious musical wig-outs with intimate vocal sections featuring Reeve duetting with Emma Pollock. More expansive still is the title track, where Reeve’s sweet, unusually worded verses attempt to ground increasingly chaotic instrumentation.

“The music reflects the ideas in the song, which is about the fact that, even if I could achieve all these things I want to, I would still be grounded at some point,” Reeve says, after explaining that Flock’s cover art, a delicate oil painting of a bird, was done, like previous Strike The Colours album art, by acclaimed figurative painter Cherylene Dyer.

THE lyrics to the title song came from a writing session in which Reeve used her non-dominant right hand, a technique which is thought to access the more creative part of the brain.

“The idea is that it somehow bypasses all the structuring that we’ve been put through all our lives and it unlocks some truth, I guess, in terms of what’s coming out,” she says. “I think it’s the childlike side, more honest.”

Honesty was key to making the album, Reeve explains. Monnow Valley had been chosen to capture the band’s onstage energy, with the songs being developed collaboratively between the four in the studio’s famous live room. Joined by Louis Abbott of Admiral Fallow, who frequently provides a vocal foil to Reeve, they worked around the clock, encouraged along the way by Savage.

“For my own benefit, it was important to be as honest and candid as I could be,” says Reeve. “I did try and go back on that intention a few times, but Paul would be like: ‘You need to be owning this. I can’t hear what you’re singing, you’re going to have to get your mouth around the words.’ I found that hard. I would have been inclined to try to cover things up by making them pretty. And they are not pretty things, a lot of the time. Paul’s whole thing was that, if I cleaned it up, sanitised it, it wouldn’t be the same record; that we weren’t going to end with the intention we started with, which was to have a live sound.”

REEVE recently supported Moffat and RM Hubbert on tour, playing solo acoustic versions of some of the songs on Flock.

“My initial reaction was to say no,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I’d be able to. I was like: ‘Are these songs still relevant?’, ‘Can I still play them?’, ‘Will anyone care?’ – I decided to set myself the challenge of saying yes and thought I could worry about it all later. Doing it made me realise how much I missed doing it, using my voice, and playing guitar. And the reaction I got was really lovely, not that that should determine what you do, but it’s helpful in testing the waters.”

The experience of releasing Flock has given Reeve a sense of liberation, she says. It’s helped her realise a vital personal priority – of playing with like-minded musicians.

“Between myself and Jonny and Davey and Graeme, I think what we have is quite unusual,” she says. “We have this really great musical understanding and symbiosis and trust and friendship. It’s never going to be time ill-spent, no matter what we do.

“For me, having that musical family is more important than anything else. I know from experience it’s quite rare, and as long as I’ve got that I’ll be in a place where I want to keep playing, in whatever shape that takes.”

Dec 16, The Hug and Pint, Glasgow, 7.30pm, £8.50. Tickets: bit.ly/STCDec16. Flock is released on November 30. Facebook.com/strikethecolours @strikecolours