They say you should never meet your heroes. Well, we met Mystery Jets, and they were angelic. We were only supposed to have five minutes of the band’s time, but they gave us 45 over quiche in the Fitzbillies on Bridge Street. Jack, bassist, clad in an elaborate fur coat, twiddles a second-hand camera from the Oxfam next door. The band are performing in Cambridge tonight and are touring the Oxfam stores local to their concert venues to promote the ‘Oxjam’ festival. 

Will, vocals and guitar, explains how the connection is personal for the band, not just because they have performed in several charity concerts before, but as keen charity-shoppers themselves. As he says, “it’s what a lot of people in their twenties get up to... so it’s nice to acknowledge that.”

But that’s an age most members of the band are leaving behind, a concern around which both their recent album, Curve of the Earth, and their most recent EP, The World is Overtaking Me, clearly revolves. Jack tells us how they started out trying to write a space-rock album, but then realised the common denominator of all the songs was scale. 

Will clarifies: “scale through our eyes”, a new sense of perspective on your own past. “You appreciate for the first time the scale of what you’ve been involved in.” The record is definitely one of their most autobiographical, and personal, to date. ‘Taken by the Tide’, for example, is widely believed to be about ex-member Kai Fish’s departure from the band; Blaine sings “Brother I thought that you would be there till the end/ You were my rock upon which I could always depend.”

It’s a far cry from the bubbly nostalgia of Mystery Jets’ earlier songs. Is this an album about loss and hopelessness? The band certainly show some signs of despondency about the state of the world, in particular about our technologically-saturated lives. They’ve made some tentative forays into the future, including a collaboration with a tech company that will turn their recording studio into a virtual reality experience, but they’re ambivalent at best about what the future holds. 

It’s a depressing time in America and in Europe, Will says, and the world seems to be self-destructing. “It makes sense for people to disengage from the body and the material: to exist somewhere else inside computers.” At the end of the day, though, you have to pick your battles. Would Will like to lead a crusade against music streaming culture, in which artists receive only the tiniest fraction of the profits? Yes, in an ideal world, but that would take an army of lawyers, and as Will puts it: “I’d rather make music.”

In fact, the main theme of the album appears to be accepting what you can’t control, and holding onto the things you can change. In the song  ‘Bombay Blue’, there’s a definite sense of this in the lines: “they say there’s nothing you can do/ but that’s what they want you to believe.” As it happens, Will says this is the band’s favourite song to play off the new album. 

There’s a certain inevitability, being in a band now a decade old, that you’ll be constantly dragging around all the older versions of yourself, preserved for all time in a music video from 2008. But this is a burden the band bear with characteristic humility. Requests from fans to play the old favourites, Will says, isn’t annoying; it’s flattering. 

“Our job as musicians and artists is to update and inform what we have done in the past with what we are doing now. Inject it with fresh energy, like a new set of clothes.” The Mystery Jets seem to be saying yes, there are elements of futility, but that doesn’t mean everything’s hopeless.

And in fact, live later that evening, hopeless is about as far from the atmosphere in the Cambridge Junction as you could get. The crowd laps up old and new songs alike, and the band respond to the surge of energy, Jack still spinning around in that flamboyant fur coat. One true constant, through 10 years of music, five albums and one traumatic line-up change still remains: Blaine’s dad, Henry. A member of the band in its earliest days, he is welcomed onto the stage for the final song, leading the audience as everyone sways from side to side in time with the music. 

They dedicate ‘The End Up’, the last track on the new album, to a soon-to-be-married couple in the audience who’ll be using the song as their first dance. Earlier that afternoon we mention to Will as the interview closes how, as wide-eyed young freshers, we cemented our friendship over repeated listenings of their song ‘Sister Everett’. Will smiles. “The Mystery Jets have a knack for that.”