Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody talks ahead of Birmingham show

Since their 1998 debut, Songs for Polarbears, which Pitchfork hailed as “an impressive piece of work,” their melancholy anthems of heartbreak and separation have mended hearts, and the band has racked up an impressive number of critical and commercial accolades, including 15 million global album sales, 1+ billion global track streams, five UK platinum albums, and are Grammy, BRIT Award and Mercury Music Prize nominated.

They emerged as heartsore musical prophets in the shadow of grunge and shallow pop, striking a chord in the minds, memories and hearts of listeners over six groundbreaking, confessional albums.

Eyes Open, released in 2006, was the biggest-selling album in the UK that year; they went on to headline such festivals as the prestigious T in the Park. But after their Fallen Empires tour ended in 2012, band members — guitarist, vocalist Gary Lightbody, guitarists Johnny McDaid and Nathan Connolly, bassist Paul Wilson, and drummer Jonny Quinn — decided to stop for a while.

“We were exhausted at the end of the tour,” says Lightbody. “We went from album to tour, album to tour for 10 years. We needed to take a break. And it just kind of kept extending. It wasn’t that we planned to take six years off by any means.

“We all started living our own lives and realizing that we actually had lives outside of the band, a band that we still had an awful lot of fondness for and that we did want to come back to, I just perhaps needed more time than I first thought,” explains Lightbody.

In the interim, Quinn started a family, Connolly formed and fronted Little Matador, Wilson signed on as the touring guitarist in Foo Fighters bassist Nate Mendel’s band Lieutenant, and McDaid wrote songs and produced such diverse artists as Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, Robbie Williams, Ed Sheeran and Pink.

Lightbody put the finishing touches on The Ghost of the Mountain, the second album by his Tired Pony side project with members of Belle and Sebastian, R.E.M, Reindeer Section and Fresh Young Fellows. He then moved to Los Angeles and began writing songs for movies, and doing a number of high-profile co-writes with Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and One Direction. Songs that weren’t pulled from his own psyche were less painful to craft, and went a long way into healing what he considered to be writer’s block.

But something else unexpectedly stimulated his writing even more. Two years ago he quit drinking. “Drinking was the only place I could hide from myself and if I was drunk I wasn’t depressed, just the next day, but that could be remedied with more drink.” But he didn’t want that anymore.

“I’d been writing songs for years about love. I’d been down that road so many times before. And I just knew that this album had to be something different. I had to look both deeper inside myself and out into the wider world around me and both seemed to be in chaos.”

Which is what he did for Snow Patrol’s seventh album. Titled Wildness, it taps into something raw and primitive.

“There are many types of wildness,” says Lightbody, “but I think it can be distilled into two: the wildness of the modern age and something more primal.”

The album kicks off with the grand “Life on Earth,” which finds the musician singing about the first snow (the first time the word snow has ever been used in a Snow Patrol song) and the first day in a strange new land.

The band’s tour brings them to Arena Birmingham tonight, and we wait with baited breath.