TWO misconceptions about British Sea Power, the Cumbria-born band of eccentrics making music since the turn of the millennium, must be dealt with. The first, that they're somehow dull – The National is still appalled to have read a review around a decade ago which lumped them in with the abhorred “indie landfill” which clogged up the charts in the mid 2000s – can only be down to such accusers having cotton buds lodged in their lugs. While not perhaps musically avant garde, this is a bunch whose songs so team with ideas, from philosophy and religion to art and literature you need a notebook and an encyclopedia to keep up. Second, that their name connotes an off-putting love for BritNat imperialism, smacks of the knee-jerk. Who could think that a band whose stage shows have regularly featured a comical menagerie of foliage and stuffed birds, who have recorded love songs to melting icebergs and an affectionately over-wrought cover of The Wurzels' I Am A Cider Drinker are tub-thumping right-wingers? The joyous Waving Flags, from 2008 album Do You Like Rock Music? featured in an anti-Ukip campaign a few years ago. Backed by a Bulgarian choir, if the defiantly epic celebration of immigration had been used by Remain, it's doubtful we would be in this pickle today. Be assured: BSP are unlikely to feature on Nigel Farage's Christmas card list.

It's strange to look back now, but when BSP formed in the late 1990s, things looked on the up. Hell, this was pre 9/11; intelligent artists with things to say could afford to be ironic.

“People were hopefully uniting and caring about the environment more,” recalls guitarist/vocalist Jan Scott Wilkinson. “Politics seemed to be getting in touch with younger people. You could travel Europe without loads of paper work and things like the end of the world by nuclear war seemed a past fantasy. And as a young band starting out, we thought we’d have an intelligent and even funny post-modern kind of name. Some kind of idea of not forgetting the less savory elements of the past for fear they could come back and haunt us, but also recycling them into something positive and creative for the future.

“I did float the idea of changing our name in light of the current wave of populism and ignorance, just before our last album, to something like International/European or even Galactic or Universal Sea Power. It may have been the fact that I also linked this to a proposed idea to move towards space funk that put the other members off! Maybe we should have a referendum of our fans to see if we should change our name.”

Talking of which, Wilkinson says that the treatment of Scotland after the EU referendum has been “unfair” and that the idea of one referendum on Scottish independence being “the end of it is nonsense”. Scotland should, he says, “do whatever it needs to do to continue being the lovely inviting place it is.”

So inviting, in fact, that one third of BSP now live in Skye. Wilkinson's bass and guitar-playing brother Neil Hamilton and viola player Abi Fry recently made the island their home after a “very basic wee bothy popped up on the internet”.

“We can't believe how lucky we were to end up on such a stunning island and found ourselves instantly welcomed into the wonderful community,” says Fry. “The wildlife is amazing and we've met some really sweet animals, including a resident weasel who stores dead mice in the wall of our house and a tame hare which Hamilton strokes. We couldn't be happier really. Before we lived in Brighton, which is a great city, but the hustle and bustle all seems quite absurd now when we visit.”

Let The Dancers Inherit The Party, the band's first new material since 2013's Machineries Of Joy, was partly recorded on the island, albeit in between power cuts due to high winds. Grappling with absurdity is a pervasive theme of the record, which features typography influenced by Kurt Schwitters, a Dadaist artist who fled Nazi Germany and whose work the two brothers discovered while growing up in the Lake District. Addressing climate change, “kings of propaganda” such as Steve Bannon and how the individual can feel powerless amid the current chaos, it may remind fans of the portentous opening line to Canvey Island, a track from Do You Like Rock Music? Referring to bird flu, it went: “H5N1/killed a wild swan/it was the kind of omen/of everything to come".

That record was released in 2008, the year of the economic crisis. Muscular and melodic, the new album offers a sense of how to stay sane in the face of international lunacy on tracks such as the thunderous Bad Bohemian - its title a nod to Jaroslav Hasek, the author of the darkly hilarious anti-war satire The Good Soldier Svejk - and Keep On Trying (Sechs Freunde), a morale-boosting celebration of friendship and the new communities to be forged in our ever-connected world.

“I’m an optimist of sorts myself which is why the emotional feeling of the album is a positive one whilst also accepting the confusion, the fears, and how it's easy to get overwhelmed or down about everything,” says Wilkinson, talking on the day of the attack at Westminster. “I think keeping up on news and events is a good thing but in my experience the world I walk around in is a much nicer place than the one I see on TV. Ideas and information have never travelled so fast and this gives us the possibility of things being better than ever as much as worse than ever.”

Sir Cecil Parrott, who translated The Good Soldier Svejk, described Hasek as a “truant, rebel, vagabond, anarchist, play-actor, practical joker, bohemian, alcoholic, traitor to the Czech legion, Bolshevik and bigamist.”

Perhaps, Wilkinson says, we can learn from at least some of those traits.

“I suppose Bad Bohemian may be about finding some resolve to live a meaning full life in an absurd world where meanings are often deceptive. Try to do some good, look after those you love and be nice to people in general. But most of all don’t forgot to have a laugh no matter what.”

It's the rather haunted album track Praise For Whatever from which the album takes its name. It reminded The National of a recent online conversation about politics, in which the other person said: “I think the poets should have a go at making the rules”.

“The line is stolen from the poem by Ian Hamilton Finlay,” says Wilkinson of the writer, artist and gardener who died in Edinburgh in 2006. The entirety of the poem is only five lines:

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy

Not so when I have danced for an hour

The dancers inherit the party

While the talkers wear themselves out and sit in corners alone, and glower

“Sometimes talking isn’t the best thing, not all the time,” Wilkinson explains. “Make sure you get involved with some fun. Have a dance or something.The only poet I've known was the equally amazing and very loveable Jock Scot who we performed with and drank with a few times. He could have certainly have come up with some good rules.”

April 9, Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh, 7pm, £18.50.

Let The Dancers Inherit The Party is released tomorrow on Golden Chariot www.britishseapower.co.uk