Specialising in simple, sunnily produced power pop, Scotland's Teenage Fanclub have always been a band you either love or ignore.

The larger public may not have found much use for 15 years' worth of pocket pop symphonies but 30-something men continue to speak of them with a sense of passionate connection which can't be explained by the cover image for their third album (a football) and the title of their fourth (Grand Prix).

For Kurt Cobain, who invited them to open for Nirvana on the Nevermind tour, they were "the best band in the world".

From humble beginnings - their debut, A Catholic Education, was financed by the sale of a washing machine and fridge left to them in a neighbour's will - Teenage Fanclub made their name with 1991's Bandwagonesque. Padding cranked guitars amid softer acoustics, it was the album which, alongside Primal Scream's Screamadelica and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, secured their label Creation's hold on the Nineties music scene.

With drummers coming and going as drummers are want to do, the band has sustained itself over the years through the three-way singer/song-writing partnership between Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley and Gerard Love, meshing melodic vocals and cocooning them in a warm, indie fuzz.

The last fans heard of The Fannies was in 2003 when, following the dissolution of Creation, Sony bullied the band into releasing the compilation Four Thousand Seven Hundred And Sixty-Six Seconds: A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub. But this was, it now seems, not a self-sealing retrospective but a decks-clearing exercise.

Freed from contractual obligations, the band reunited with original drummer Francis Macdonald, went to Chicago, enlisted Tortoise's John McEntire as producer and set up their own label, PeMa.

Released a week ago, the resulting album, Man-Made, is a triumph of quiet truths and comforting familiarity in which, thanks to McEntire's minimal, carefully-weighted production, lyrical folk pop is free to busk in the sunshine.

It is, some say, their best record since Bandwagonesque. But Blake is sensibly aware that "pop music doesn't like mature musicians".

"It's not like painters and writers," he says, "who are thought to do their best stuff when they are 50, to be at the peak of their powers because they have life experience. With musicians, when you get older, some people just don't want to know."

Still, he reckons, "it's not all over until you're on tour, you wake up one morning and you go to the gym in the hotel".