So much has changed since Kurt Wagner first led Lambchop out of his downstairs basement where they used to rehearse, at his house in a quiet Nashville suburb. Back then they were a ramshackle outfit, a charming drinking buddy collective taking the music they heard around them in Music City – the butt of jokes amongst the critical elite at the time – and mixing it with the music that they loved, Wagner topping it all off with his weird, abstract lyrics about a “soaky in the pooper” and cowboys on the moon. They were a curiosity: the fact that anyone would want to release the album they recorded as great a surprise to the band as anyone. Perhaps, if it had not been picked up by a small group of fervent fans and critics seduced by what the band archly called ‘The New Sound Of Nashville’, it would have been their only album.

Yet now, almost two decades later, Lambchop return with their tenth, OH (ohio). The musical landscape could hardly be more different. Nashville is ‘cool’ again: Jack White has a home there, Kings Of Leon are a household name, and Harmony Korine directs Budweiser commercials featuring Lambchop’s William Tyler and Nashville institution Dave Cloud at Springwater (the legendary dive where Lambchop and many other local bands cut their teeth).

OH (ohio) continues the Lambchop tradition, where each successive record represents a new stage in the evolution of their distinctive sound. It’s a natural process which has seen them progress from their shambolic early recordings on Jack’s Tulips / I Hope You’re Sitting Down to the off kilter pop experimentalism of What Another Man Spills on to the joyful soul of Nixon and then, pointedly, its polar opposite, the piano-led minimalism of Is A Woman. Most recently Damaged saw Wagner leave the porch from which he had viewed the world for so long and start looking inside himself, his dark meditations on mortality and human frailty matched by a band capable of taking delicacy to delicious new heights.

OH (ohio) finds Kurt delving deeper into himself – the songs were road-tested on a Wagner solo tour of the UK and Europe in 2007. The album features a new producer, Roger Moutenot (Yo La Tengo, Sleater Kinney, Freedy Johnson), who split duties with Marky Nevers

The fundamental nature of the band itself has altered. “The last five years have been about a distillation of the collective into a core band: Tony Crow (piano), William Tyler (guitar), Matt Swanson (bass), Alex McManus (guitar) and now Ryan Norris (keyboards, guitar) and Scott Martin (drums). But,” he continues, “Lambchop more and more has become a vehicle for my songs and myself as an artist. I’ve fought against that interpretation for twenty years, but now I’ve just given up trying to fight it anymore. I am simply going to accept that this is how it’s evolved and leave it to others to define.”

Kurt’s lack of interest in being ‘the frontman’ was one of the appeals that the collective mentality the band championed for so long held for him. Recent releases have seen him shy away from the spotlight by ‘showcasing’ other musicians, most notably Tony Crow on Is A Woman and William Tyler on Damaged. “Marky would say that I was the ‘featured player’ on OHIO,” Kurt concedes, “and he would say it’s about time, too.”