Alan Palomo is the man behind Neon Indian, the Texan Chillwave band whose Deadbeat Summer could soundtrack every one of your school holidays from the age of 15. Combining woozy delusion with genuine lyrical emotional turmoil, his unique style has been all over the Internet warming the critics cockles for ages. Only now, nearly a year after it was released in the US the album Psychic Chasms is being released here.

So Alan, why’s that then, you not like us?
NO! No that’s definitely not it at all. If anything before the record even came out in the US I had more of an impression in my mind that it would click a little better over here than in the US. As far as electronic influences go, what got me into electronic music was inhaling the whole Mute Records catalogue and so much music that spawned over here. So I don’t know why it didn't come out over here sooner.

To me if anything, I'm a little more emotionally attached to releasing it over here than the initial one because now it’s this fully actualised aesthetic. So if anything you guys are getting the fully actualised concept of what the album was initially intended to be.

I guess these days the actual ‘releasing’ isn’t that important because as soon as anything was out in the US, we could find it on the internet. The people buying the album then are probably people who have already heard the songs on it and are buying it because they really like it, and because they want something...
Tangible! Yeah. Absolutely. Well that kind of lets people know that you’re not some kind of internet abstraction, not just some Myspace page floating around. It’s nice to show face and perform, give people some kind of souvenir I guess.

Are there extra tracks with it?
Yeah we basically put this remix album on there that was the result of natural collaborations which happened less with emailing someone and more just playing a show with someone, or running into someone or being at a festival and having a couple of beers with this band you really love. It’s like a cool little scrapbook of this past year.

Like a year book, signed by everyone?
Yeah, exactly. Like ‘Stay Cool!’ 

When you started to play with a live band, as opposed to on your own in your bedroom, did it make you look differently at your own songs? Or maybe change how you’d write song now?
Yeah I’d definitely say so. Performing every night with different people, who all come from different musical influences, different kinds of bands and inject their own sensibilities in these songs that were just written in a night. It’s very interesting to revisit them and have them re-contextualised in front of you.

It definitely took shape over time, each time we come back to England, the show has changed so much. Our first headline show at the Barfly was a complete fucking disaster. I’d never been in Europe, I wasn’t too familiar with the power conversion, I fried a lot of my equipment. I remember that moment at barfly right before I got up and realised, oh man, only one of the power supplies is working, I can either plug it into my delay pedal or into my midi controller, but I can’t do both.

To come back now and finally be able to show people what it was meant to be is kind of nice. It’s a bit of a challenge, it feels like Rocky III where we have to overcome these obstacles...

...I’ve never seen Rocky III, though now I’m imagining some slow motion montages.
Yeah there are all these montages where he’s running on the beach and hanging out with his friends, then their are flashbacks to him dying in the ring.

I read that your name Neon Indian came from an ex-girlfriend, as did the idea behind the song Should’ve taken acid with you. I think it’s pretty rare for people to openly acknowledge the personal meanings behind their songs, would you say these songs are particularly personal?
As a result of Neon Indian yes, I think before there were references but I think this was the first time I was trying to write music transparently. When I wrote it [Psychic Chasms] I was in this kind of weird alienation. There was this odd sense of rejection from the musical community in Austin. I guess then the context of it is, ‘why can’t I connect in this place?’ Because I wasn’t really talking to any people I was forced to kind of, meticulously analyze the last three years of my life, and particularly one relationship, and I don’t want to get too into the story because it gets really goofy.

And at the time being obsessed with revisiting memories and, I guess like playing a record so many times until it degrades and takes on a life of its own. The more I think about those old memories, there not even the same things anymore – you amplify certain things, things get negated and its reshaped. You end up revelling more in the idea of the idea than the actual experience itself.

Do you think that’s something that’s echoed musically, the sense of altered nostalgia? Like a musical memory that you’ve looked back on and seen differently?
Yeah, absolutely! It’s like something that will always be on the tip of your tongue. Now I can really just write an ode to it than something in the actual mood itself. It ties into the idea of writing music that seems kind of referential but you can’t quite figure out what song it reminds you of. Or creating the illusion of something that seems familiar.