Bibio will return on April 4 with a new album for Warp Records, Mind Bokeh.

It’s the follow-up to his cult 2009 album, Ambivalence Avenue, and will be released on CD, vinyl and digital, with early copies of the CD housed in die cut sleeves.

Bibio’s sepia-toned, gently psychedelic music seems all the more prescient and relevant in the wake of US chillwave and hypnagogic pop, though one of its strongest features remains its distinct Englishness, with a clear debt to 90s Warp, Mo’Wax and Ninja Tune trip-hop. For Mind Bokeh the producer, real name Stephen Wilkinson, promises a “balance of the familiar and the non-familiar”, adding: “I don’t simply want to be repeating myself”.

One of the album’s key tracks is ‘Take Of Your Shirt’, which Wilkinson says is about “the frustrations of living in English towns with little aspiration beyond getting boozed up, being vulgar and fighting.” Being vulgar? Isn’t that as key to English identity as a love of processed pork products? Anyway, this is a darker but also more expansive and ultimately poppier record than the sun-dappled but inward-looking Ambivalence Avenue, with a press release citing influences as diverse as French house, afrobeat, Thin Lizzy and Peter Frampton.

“What happens after writing music for many years is that your influence comes from within as well as without,” adds Wilkinson. “Imaginary bands, an idea of what an era sounded like rather than necessarily the thing as itself.”

What about that title? Apparently ‘Bokeh’ (pronounced like ‘bouquet’) is a Japanese word, variously meaning ‘haze’, ‘blur’ and, er, ‘dementia’. “I called the album Mind Bokeh because I’m interested in the effect of defocussing your mind,” says Wilkinson, “whether through meditation, chemicals or whatever – it’s a state of mind quite alien to Westerners.” Hang on, isn’t that what “getting boozed up” is all about?

Check out the following video preview of the LP:

Tracklist:
1. Excuses
2. Pretentious
3. Anything New
4. Wake Up!
5. Light Seep
6. Take Off Your Shirt
7. Artists’ Valley
8. K is for Kelson
9. Mind Bokeh
10. More Excuses
11. Feminine Eye
12. Saint Christopher