A few weeks before the official release of La République des Meteors, Indochine whetted fans' appetites with Little Dolls, a single accompanied by a hardhitting video clip that set the tone for what was to follow. The visually stunning clip spliced images of soldiers marching to the front in 1914 with footage of extremist youth groups from the 1930s intercut with flashes of 1950s Hawaiian surf kitsch. These surreal juxtapositions and visual collisions paved the way for a new chapter in Indochine's history: the release of La République des Meteors, the band's kookiest and yet most serious album to date. 

After ten albums - which have all more or less revolved around the thrills, spills and hormonal angst of adolescence - Nicola Sirkis radically shifted his songwriting perspective and decided to turn a wide-angle lens on History. His new songs tap into timeless emotions like separation, absence and gut-wrenching fear, into the ambiguous romanticism of collective virility and martial urges. This is not to say that the entire album is devoted to young soldiers who died in the trenches, but the ghosts from wars past certainly raise their heads on Le Lac, Union War, Les aubes sont mortes and La Lettre de métal and float evocatively behind the more enigmatic lyrics of Little Dolls and Un ange à ma table.

Sirkis claims that he never set out with the intention of writing a "historical" album, but admits that "having a long career behind us means we have the freedom to experiment with new themes when we want to". Indochine's youthful frontman and main songwriter says that he felt singularly uninspired when he first set pen to paper after the band's extensive Alice et June tour. But then he had a kind of personal epiphany visiting the pavilion designed by the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Calle's work, entitled Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself), was triggered by a lover dumping her by e-mail.

Sirkis ended up running into Calle in Paris one day and, in a bizarre twist of art inspiring more art, he dreamt that Calle penned a series of songs for him. On waking, he found himself curiously moved and motivated to write about the themes of separation and loss. "I've never revealed anything about my private life in my songs before," he says. "I've never used my work as a means to voice personal complaints, like some other artists do singing about how hard it is to make an album or how painful it's been splitting up."

After subsuming the pain of personal separation into the image of couples torn apart by war, Sirkis talks more explicitly about himself on songs such as Play Boy, where he writes in the first person singular for the first time in his career. His "I" has nothing symbolic about it, either. Listening to the tracks on Indochine's new album one gets a very real sense of Sirkis' anger about topical issues such as a certain French music star fleeing to Switzerland as a tax exile. Meanwhile, on a song like Republika, Sirkis voices the disillusionment of a whole sector of Western opinion disenchanted with their political institutions.  

Sirkis insists that nothing about an Indochine album is ever premeditated, however. "How can you be sure of the way a song will turn out in advance?" he asks. "I'm constantly writing texts, but I never know whether they'll be used for song lyrics or a book. I always carry a notebook or a dictaphone around with me wherever I go so that I can jot down ideas whenever they occur. All these ideas gradually pile up in my brain like a big database. For three years now I've had this urge to get the word 'republic' into a song somewhere. It just sounds so good phonetically. Then that evolved into the concept of being "republican from afar." But, believe me, before that original idea turned into the song Republika a lot more work had to go into things! You have to rehearse a song over and over again to see whether it's got punch or not and I have to hit upon just the right thing to bring it to life. A song like Republika is, in many ways, an act of chance. You can never guarantee the final result!"

For an act of chance Republika is an impressive anthem for modern times, a sort of lyrical indie-rock epic that will doubtless be added to Indochine's long list of hits. Given Indochine's status as indie-rock veterans, influencing a whole new generation almost thirty years after their debut, the French record chain Fnac recently asked the band to make a Carte blanche compilation of their own influences. The band revealed a broad range of inspiration ranging from David Bowie, XTC, Joy Division, Patti Smith, The Stone Roses and Suede to Antony & the Johnsons, Asyl, Santogold and Luna Parker's classic Tes états d’âme Eric. This eclectic mix of guitar rock, post-rock and new wave filtered through Indochine's own musical consciousness over the years inspiring the "not far off 200 songs" the band have recorded to date.

Following in the march of history, Indochine are due to kick off a new tour on 6 October 2009, playing 34 concerts across France and Belgium (although several dates have since been added to the band's original schedule to satisfy growing demand). Sirkis and his indie-rock boys are set to round things off with a grand finale at the Stade de France on 26 June 2010. 

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 Listen to an extract from Little Dolls

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