David Bowie famously decamped to Berlin as he sought to dry out from drugs and reinvent himself.

Moving in with Iggy Pop to dust the cobwebs from The Thin White Duke and avoid the debauched parties of 1970s London seemed a strange approach at the time, but the German capital provided the spark for Bowie classic Heroes and Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life.

The Rakes might not have Bowie’s inner demons to vanquish but, by deciding to record new album Klang in a former East German government radio station set among wild animals and squatters in outer Berlin, they have certainly shaken up the recording process.

“We all wanted to get out of our comfort zone and make something special,” says singer Alan Donohue, speaking from the Brighton residence he has called home for the past year.

“We are a city band so it wasn’t a case of going to the countryside or anything like that. Our producer Chris Zane is from New York and we decided it was time to chuck all our cards up in the air and see what came out.”

But why Berlin and not another city, say Manchester – perhaps more fitted to The Rakes’ gritty musings on distorted city life?

“Berlin suited the sound of the album,” says Donohue. “We were going that way anyway – pretty rough around the edges. We purposefully left some space in lyrics for the experiences we’d have in Berlin so they could seep into the songs, and we all agreed the music made in Berlin hasn’t aged, it is just very innovative.”

Just as the band’s debut Capture/ Release was the sound of London turning its back on New Labour and attacking the rat race, Klang, which translates roughly as a German onomatopoeia for sound, echoes 21st century Berlin. It is immediate, it steams and fizzes like sulphuric acid, and is done and dusted within 29 minutes.

“We liked the sound of Klang. One syllable, short, to the point,” says Donohue. “It was recorded in only two weeks. We spent a year writing enough material for three albums, then took the best ten songs and blasted through them doing one song a day to capture The Rakes’ energy, with no silly stuff around the edges.”

Donohue’s lyrics are similarly decisive. Wry, honest, upside-down tales of quotidian life with references a child could understand.

Tracks such as The Woes Of The Working Woman and The Loneliness Of The Outdoor Smoker dispose of all the post-nu rave, post-terrorism paranoia of sophomore effort Ten New Messages to show a band growing back into a skin they know.

“Third album in, it might be typical to crack open the string section, some samples or try to marry up rock music with dance or jazz or something,” Donohue says in his eloquent, considered tone.

“That’s fine if you’re Radiohead, but we decided to do something raw. We’re not punk, but we wanted mistakes to be captured to make a human, organic record – and that’s what I think we’ve achieved.”

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