Last month, the Scottish indie-pop band Belle and Sebastian released their ninth album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance. I have a poster of Tigermilk, their very first album on my wall, and one of Gold Help The Girl, the musical film project that lead singer Stuart Murdoch released last summer. In short, they’re one of my favourite bands.

However, I found myself having a (very twee) crisis with the release of their latest album. I put off  listening to the entire thing, because I was struck with the fear that (a) it would be awful and (b) it would entirely taint the rest of their work for me. This then prompted even more soul-searching, and I realised that (c) I was exactly a year old when they released their early work, so do I have the right to be nostalgic about them as a band? and (d) perhaps it’s ridiculous to expect bands to evoke the same powerful emotions that the music they created 20 years ago did. Also: (e) oh my God, I probably have an essay to write, I must stop dwelling on this.

What is it about the early Belle and Sebastian albums that make me feel so connected to the group? Is it just an artificial nostalgia for a 1990s Scotland that I didn’t actually ever experience? Did I just relish being a part of a group of moody teens that liked wearing cardigans?

Perhaps it was their charming origin story; among indie-pop bands, Belle and Sebastian’s formation seems almost mythical, which is probably why Pitchfork made a documentary about the band’s early days. The story begins in 1996 when Stuart Murdoch emerged from years of isolation and solitude due to chronic fatigue, and created a band with people that he met in a music workshop for the unemployed. I always felt there was some manifestation of these origins in their lyrics, but couldn’t articulate just what in a satisfying way until I re-watched the documentary.

He explains, “I wanted to write about normal people doing normal things, because I wasn’t normal”. For instance, ‘Expectations’, one of the first songs I ever heard from them, is about a brutally mediocre experience of secondary school. The band modestly describes their following album, If You’re Feeling Sinister, as a “strong set” of songs, but you’ll frequently find it on collections of‘Top Albums of the 90s’. This album effortlessly follows the story of all sorts of people: from track stars (‘The Stars of Track and Field’), an army major (‘Me and the Major’), to a teenage rebel (‘Judy and the Dream of Horses’), and a lost Catholic (‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’).

In their early days, the band shielded their personalities and adopted an idiosyncratic approach to the music industry: they released no singles from albums, did no promotion, no press, and didn’t even appear in their own press photos for years. Obviously, this just isn’t something you could do in 2015 and the band have moved on from their reclusive nature – they even have a Twitter account. It’s fair to say that things have changed from the enigmatic style of their 90s ‘glory days’.

Even Stuart Murdoch is no longer the same person he was in 1996, when he wrote those troubled but sweet and clever songs, living in a church hall and wearing corduroy. So I suppose that it’s not really a surprise that their first two albums evoke such a strong, personal connection to such heartfelt and therapeutic songs, with anything new being just a little bit scary.

Yes, the time that I got into them was around the time that I started my typically teenage period of self-discovery, and I’ve come to realise that it’s unlikely to be nostalgia for a musical era that gives their early work a special place inside my heart. Aside from the obvious talent on display in their early work, the age that I was exposed to them, my personal era, probably played a role as well. Their songs speak about loneliness, but a lot of them are also strangely life affirming. It was only after some soul-searching that I realised the extent to which I associate them with certain places and certain people.

Murdoch describes it best when he says that ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ is the record of the band in 1996. For me, I guess the album will always be a record of the trials and tribulations of being a fourteen-year-old girl in 2009. Human beings are not static – we are always growing, shifting, moving on. Belle and Sebastian have been getting older, and I’m not wistfully longing for a revival of their past.

Their new album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance isn’t like their first two albums and nor should it to be. This album sees them fully experimenting with the electronic disco vibe only hinted at in their older work, but the core of what drew me to them is still there: their storytelling, their honesty, their dark humour all wrapped in playful tunes. Nobody’s Empire, their latest single and the opening track to the album, is the most “traditional” sounding Belle and Sebastian track, but it sees Murdoch discussing his chronic fatigue in the most explicit, personal way so far.

They’re playing at the Corn Exchange on May 7th and I fully expect to see a mix of people who first discovered them on a mixtape in the 1990s and of young students who listened to songs like ‘Get Me Away From Here’ and ‘I’m Dying’ on repeat during their secondary school days. And I will be dancing along to their songs, old and new, with the same questionable style I had aged fourteen. Wise as always, Murdoch himself said of their new trajectory, “A little bit older, but no wiser, maturing like a fine wine ought to, our love for music, and the chance to lay it on your tender ear, is not diminished. We will pop you.”