"It usually ends in disaster when you’re trying to make an album to a schedule," Gary Lightbody, frontman of Snow Patrol, says by way of explanation for his band having not released a studio album in six years.

"There’s no point in releasing an album that you’re not proud of, or you’re just trying to fill a gap somewhere. None of us wants to do that, or do it to people who are fans of the band – some of them for 30 years.”

Of course, when you've sold over 10 million albums worldwide and written some of the most successful songs of your era you can probably afford to take your time, but stadium success did not come overnight.

Formed at the University of Dundee in 1994, Snow Patrol released two LPs - Songs for Polarbears and When It's All Over We Still Have To Clear Up - on indie label Jeepster while living in Glasgow.

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Both were critically successful but failed to make any waves commercially - though despite what the Scotland.org website will tell you, the singer wasn't working in Nice N Sleazy's at the time. "I drank in Nice N Sleazys a lot", he clarifies.

Things changed with third album Final Straw. Lead single 'Spitting Games', a breezy indie pop tune, reached just #54 on the charts on its initial release but its follow-up, 'Run', catapulted the band to stardom.

It peaked at number five in the charts and sold over 600,000 copies, with its parent album going six times platinum.

Asked if he knew right away he had a hit on his hands, Lightbody says: "No, because 10 years had gone by with no success so the ego had been beaten out of us by then.

“It would have been a different story if we were 18 – certainly me, my ego was out of control at that age.

“I thought we were going to be on Top of the Pops by Tuesday week, so it took a long time to realise that was never going to happen.

"So when it did happen it was never taken for granted, and still isn’t 20 years later because I know what those first 10 years were like.

“None of it is for certain and it’s important to try and be the best you can be every time.

“Dundee and Glasgow taught me so much – especially the music scene in Glasgow. We were getting in with so many bands and artists that were at the top of their game.

“We learned so much from them and just being in their company. Just learning the craft and how to be a band, and what really matters which is putting the graft in: heart, soul, blood, sweat and tears.”

The hits kept coming after that. 'You're All I Have', 'Take Back The City', 'Just Say Yes' and more became festival anthems, while 'Chasing Cars' reached the top five in America and in 2019 was revealed as the most played song on British radio in the 21st Century - "80 years early", quips Lightbody.

In its wake, Lightbody collaborated with Taylor Swift on her Red album and its subsequent re-record, had a cameo in Game of Thrones, and filled in for Zane Lowe on his BBC radio show.

What would he have made of it all if the band had made it big at 18?

"Oh God, we’d have been over in a year!" he laughs.

"I wouldn’t have lasted. I think being in a band is like being in a marriage in a lot of ways, especially with the length of time that we’ve been in it so there’s also a lot of relational things that go on you have to try and overcome.

“There are things that over a 30 year career you have to endure but, God, I wouldn’t change a single thing.

“The time in Dundee, the time in Glasgow and beyond – it was all meant to happen that way.

"To be able to go out on tour straight away to play festivals and have people singing ‘Run’, ‘Just Say Yes’, ‘Open Your Eyes’ and ‘Chasing Cars’ back at you full tilt and also listen pin-drop quiet to the new songs –  it's an extraordinary privilege.

"I’ll go back to that thing I said before about not taking it for granted, it’s the same principle.

“If this had happened at 18, it would have been over by 19.”

The band's eighth album, The Forest is the Path was released on Friday, and was partially inspired by long walks in the woodlands by Lightbody's home.

The 48-year-old hasn't been in a romantic relationship for over a decade, and the LP finds him in reflective mood.

He says: "I have an opportunity now to write about love in a way that I’ve never written about it, which is from a decade away.

“I wanted to take that opportunity to write about it in that way, but by no means is that all the record is about. It’s about time, and home, and forgiveness, and failure and success, life and death… but then I’ve probably just listed the themes of every record ever made!”

Time and home are, it seems, inextricably linked. On 'This Is The Sound of Your Voice', Lightbody reflects on his native Northern Ireland, singing: "Belfast continues/never doubted it would/it's climbed off the canvas more than any other city could".

However, the frontman admits that growing up in the time of the Troubles his outlook on his homeland wasn't always so positive.

Lightbody says: "I don’t think anybody thought they would ever end. We thought this was it forever.

"There might have been some people who thought there would be a way out of it but I don’t think very many did.

“I was glad to move over to Dundee to university to get away from home, and to spend a long time in Glasgow after it just going home sporadically.

“The time I spent away was when I started to fall in love with home – my birth home, because I made a very lovely home for myself in Glasgow.

“I think it was being away – absence, heart, fonder and all that – but it wasn’t just that. It actually started to pull me. It wasn’t just that I was yearning for it myself, I felt the tug of it on me.

“A few years back I moved home completely, and I’ve fallen deeply, deeply in love with the place.

“But as a kid growing up there? I was at odds. I didn’t understand it, I’m very much a pacifist and I don’t really understand violence – though paradoxically I love boxing and MMA so what the f*** is all that about?

“But seeing violence in the streets, that’s a whole different thing. It’s something I’ve always been terrified of, it rips communities apart.

“I feel so happy that, for the most part, people in Northern Ireland want to live in peace. That’s a beautiful thing.”

The Forest is the Path is out now on Polydor Records. Snow Patrol will play the SSE Hydro in Glasgow in February 2025 - tickets are available here