If  success is a honeypot, The Maccabees have flown to it. Following a second album generally rapturously received, they are set to headline the Shockwaves NME Awards Tour in February along with Bombay Bicycle Club, The Big Pink and The Drums. Not long ago Roots Manuva rang up “out of the blue” to undertake an “effortless” and long-awaited transformation of the song ‘No Kind Words’ into ‘Empty Vessels’. Yet they are oddly unperturbed by their rush to fame. Hugo White, the band’s guitarist, openly confesses that rehearsals for the tour have yet to start; but they’ve played these venues before, at least the big ones. Playing at Brixton Academy, in particular, feels like “a home coming venue” to this South London band. Their ambition second time round is to “make it better... not saying it was bad last time”.

There will be some new songs, but they’re not yet fully formed. The Maccabees compose in an exceedingly collaborative way, taking a “skeleton” idea and by a slow (“there are hundreds of stages”) and often argumentative process (“at times we’re not very laid back... but we can be”) bashing it into a meatier shape. Not that their songs are meaty. The original skeletal form lingers in their sparse vocal lines and hooky, jerky rhythms. This refined transparency of texture has become their trademark sound, and bears a ghostly witness to their self-admittedly laborious composition process. It was this “really slow and draining process,” Hugo says, that was responsible for the unusually large gap between their first and second album. When they make their third, their project after the NME tour, they “don’t want to leave it so long” and are planning to be more independent in their song-making, working individually rather than as a group. ‘Precious Time’ is clearly catching up with these casual music makers.

This is a band who are self-professedly “not very good with our instruments”. In fact, most of them only picked up a guitar or microphone for the first time four years ago. So why, I ask Hugo, set up a band in the first place? His answer is breathtakingly nonchalant. They “kinda met each other... Knew I wanted to play guitar with someone...put me on the phone to someone, I said I heard you play the guitar, I’m learning to play...” They hammed up a few quotidian institutions (a local leisure centre, for example), spot on trend for glamourising the mundane, and got away with it. In Hugo’s own words, “it just happened that we were there and ended up doing it”. Gamely, he hopes that “we’re now a bit better at playing our instruments than we were then...” Such an exponential learning curve makes their success all the more impressive. He continues to explain how “none of us were like these amazing guitar players, we weren’t gonna be in a band cos we were going to do solos the whole time... it was more about making music as a group.” What about their name, the ‘Maccabees’, an initially arbitrary choice pulled from the Bible? Has this come to mean something, anything, to the group who bear this name?  Refreshingly, no is the answer. When asked to define The Maccabees in a few words, Hugo wryly replies “a religious group” (almost correct). The Biblical Maccabees were freedom fighters. Perhaps the most appropriate part of this (unintended, but inevitable) association, though, is its intimation of a united force, of pulling togetherness. In which case the most apt part of The Maccabees’ name is its last syllable; the ‘Bees certainly seemed to have mastered the art of making their own buzz, from scratch.

The Shockwaves NME Tour comes to the Corn Exchange on Friday 19th February.