Belle and Sebastian ready to make Hong Kong dance

There was a time when Glasgow indie outfit Belle and Sebastian could be pigeonholed under "twee pop", a genre they were instrumental in popularising with a trio of wry, wistful and articulate albums - (1996), (1996) and (1998). But since 2003's , the band have steadily pushed the musical envelope to take their dreamy, bittersweet sound in new and unexpected directions.

While the band may have dabbled with a more upbeat and expansive sound on their previous three albums, their ninth studio album, the recently released , sees them embrace it like never before. Produced by Ben H. Allen, who has worked with Bombay Bicycle Club, CeeLo Green and Animal Collective, the new record sees Belle and Sebastian setting foot in a previously unfamiliar space: the dancefloor.

On the album, the band dive headlong into disco, funk and even Europop in what is their most ambitious and surprising album yet. Over the phone from Glasgow, where all eight of the current line-up are still based, founding member and keyboard player Chris Geddes explains what inspired them to up the tempo - and why it's not as much of a departure as people think.

"We've maybe not gone quite so far in that direction before," says Geddes, better known as "Beans" due to his vegetarianism, "but we have kind of tried to do that before, stuff like on . So we're maybe going a bit further with it, but it's not completely uncharted territory. I think on previous things we have had all the synths and drum machines going, but there's always been more guitars and live stuff as well. Now we've stripped that away and left the programmed stuff a bit more exposed."

The first indication of the band's journey into the dancier side of pop came in the shape of , a disco-infused swirl of synths and effects that was released as a single late last year. Upping the tempo still further is , a kitschy slice of Europop that sounds more Pet Shop Boys than Belle and Sebastian.

Geddes says that the band knew from an early stage that they wanted these tracks to have a different, more danceable sound.

"Bob [Kildea], the guitar player who wrote the music for , knew he wanted it to be quite a dancey kind of record, then Ben Allen helped a lot and mixed it in that direction as well. [Lead singer] Stuart [Murdoch] knew from the get-go the style of production he wanted, and when we started working on it in the rehearsal room the first thing we did was to programme the sequence bassline. So it wasn't like we worked on them as conventional songs then decided to take a left turn."