IDLEWILD are the band who made me feel old.

They're the band who made me realise that perhaps my moshpit days should be numbered, as my self-respect was often found hanging about at the back of the hall while my inner adolescent charged to the front.

The epiphany came at Brixton Academy on July 12, 2002 when Idlewild were sandwiched on a bill between American cartoon punks The Vandals and Swedish swagger merchants The Hives. This was their glory year, when The Remote Part would reach No 3 in the UK album charts, they'd appear on Top Of The Pops with You Held The World In Your Arms and American English, and, in the autumn, go out on the road supporting Coldplay.

Indeed, Top Of The Pops was part of the problem. I'd been a huge fan of the band since I'd come across them in 1998 and the T-shirt I'd bought the first time I saw them in Glasgow (blue, with "Idle" on the front/"Wild" on the back in a kind of duality-of-man sort of way) was the one I wore to most gigs.

A guy in the London moshpit asked me about it and seemed impressed I'd had it for so long; he'd only come to the concert because he'd seen the band on the telly a handful of weeks previously. He was 18; I was 36, twice that age. Time to slow down, I thought, and watch the stage from afar.

The reason that anecdote popped into my head recently wasn't just because I was due to meet up with Idlewild's singer Roddy Woomble and guitarist Rod Jones for a chat about their forthcoming album, Everything Ever Written.

It was because when Woomble and Jones formed Idlewild in Edinburgh in 1995, they were 19; now they're 38, twice that age. But they're not slowing down; the opposite in fact as, after a five-year hiatus, they're returning to the realm of indie rock with Idlewild's seventh full-length studio album and a 12-date UK and European tour.

Actually, Jones never really left the genre, continuing to live in Edinburgh making three unjustly overlooked albums with The Birthday Suit. Woomble, however, moved to Mull and then Iona, while exploring the mostly acoustic world of folk music in solo guise and in collaboration with John McCusker and Kris Drever. And now they're writing and performing together again, knocking a somewhat different looking - and sounding - Idlewild into shape with long-serving original drummer Colin Newton and new recruits Luciano Rossi (keyboards) and Andrew Mitchell (bass and guitar, better known as one quarter of The Hazey Janes).

"We're careful to say that it's not the band reforming," insists Jones. "We just took a break. It's not a comeback, but it has felt almost like a rebirth in some respect."

"It's just a continuation after a pause, really," adds Woomble. "It never stopped; we just paused, reflected on ourselves, and carried on."

The result is an album that rewards fans who have grown up with the band. It's their most ambitious piece of writing, from the funky kitchen-sink-and-all stylistic mash of opener Collect Yourself, through the John Cale-like violin screech intro, rock organ and country pizzicato bass of So Many Things To Decide, to the fluttery jazz trumpet and discordant guitars of All Things Different.

As ever, though, the songs are anchored by big anthemic choruses, great pop hooks and showers of melody. It's recognisably Idlewild ... but it's more than Idlewild. Woomble's voice has deepened and matured in the intervening period, and the introduction of the new members means that the band can now handle some incredibly full-sounding, five-part close harmonies.

Can Jones and Woomble notice, I wonder, a change in each other's writing and performing, given the time they've been apart?

"You can hear it in the way Roddy sings now," says Jones. "It's much more self-assured and relaxed, and that's the same with me to some extent. It feels more relaxed but without losing the urgency I felt was missing from the latter Idlewild records. I think we were maybe living for nostalgia at that point."

"They're fairly urgent records, though, those last two," counters Woomble, defending 2007's Make Another World and 2009's Post Electric Blues.

"Yeah," Jones acquiesces, "but I think there's some inexplicable ... I hate to use the words 'X factor' because it's a horrible phrase these days. But there was something missing from those records that came from the fact I felt we were making a living from our past a little bit at that point."

"There's nothing wrong with that," says the singer.

"Well, no," continues Jones. "But having removed ourselves from that and having come back as a new thing, there's a relaxed atmosphere to it that gives it more enjoyment. Maybe it's enjoyment rather than urgency that was missing from the last records."

From what I can hear on the respective records, as well as what I can see first-hand today, I've got to agree that Idlewild in 2015 do seem to be in a happier and more creative place than they were before the break. Jones, Woomble and I are sitting on sofas in the control room of Chamber Studio in Edinburgh (where, they point out, they cut their very first punk single, Queen Of The Troubled Teens, in 1997); through the glass window in the live room I can see the others setting up to record a special session - one track from each album - to be unveiled online every day in the lead-up to the album release.

It is, as Jones has been insisting, "relaxed". That word also seems to have applied to the writing and recording of the new album. They got the ball rolling again when Jones popped over to Mull and joined Woomble to work on some demos at An Tobar, the arts centre overlooking Tobermory Bay. When Newton got on board, the songs started taking on the more defined melodic rock style that is the backbone of the Idlewild catalogue. Rossi broadened the palette, then Mitchell provided another set of multi-instrumental hands.

"Very naturally, over 16-18 months, it came together," Woomble explains. "There was a lot of work involved - I don't want to make out that it just happened, particularly for Rod who produced us and did all the recording. But with the songwriting, we took our time with it."

What about Woomble's lyrics? Do they now show a marked development on account of his folk music leanings (and the hillwalking articles and newspaper columns he'd been writing, including one for the Sunday Herald)?

"I'm not really interested in storytelling or any kind of a narrative," Woomble insists. "I suppose if you put all of my lyrics together, from when I started doing them at 18 until now, they probably do form some mad, loose, crazy narrative. But generally speaking, I always approach writing song lyrics like I don't know what I'm doing. Lyric writing to me is initially a puzzle, and then I get into the idea of how lines can correspond to each other and to music. Not many people do storytelling songwriting very well. They'd be better off writing novels.

"Another thing with lyrics: I'm still trying to work out what they're about when I listen to them. Quite often with well-known Idlewild songs, like American English, as the person who wrote them, they kind of lose their appeal a wee bit because the words are so direct. Whereas this time, I love the fact that I listen to songs like [upcoming single] Come On Ghost and I'm wondering why I wrote those words and I'm really fascinated by them too."

"That's probably a good difference between your Idlewild lyrics and your solo lyrics," notes Jones. "Your solo lyrics are not so much direct but they have more of a rolling theme throughout the record."

"They're pretty vague too, actually."

"Well, maybe it's because I'm detached from it and read into it differently," continues Jones. "But, to me, the biggest difference to this record from the last record ... lyrically and musically as well ... is that I think we were all a bit disheartened back at that time. Listening to that now, there is a vibrancy and a self-assured nature to the new songs. I believe the lyrics more and I believe the music more. To me this record sounds more honest, and I don't mean in that earnest lyric sense; I mean it feels like the record we wanted to make and we can stand behind it more than the last one."

So how will the rebirthed Idlewild stand behind this record? By marking the launch of Everything Ever Written in collaboration with Barney's Beer, the microbrewery at Edinburgh's Summerhall, for a limited edition batch Scottish Fiction IPA (the title references their collaboration with the late Edwin Morgan on the closing track of The Remote Part, although long-standing fans will be tickled by an in-joke on the label design that states "Hops Is Important").

Craft beer: another sign, perhaps, that these days Idlewild are a little more willing to admit their music is 6 Music niche rather than Radio 1 playlist, and that they're all bit more mature. But still willing to let their inner adolescent charge to the front of the moshpit.

Everything Ever Written is released on February 16, preceded by single Come On Ghost on February 9. Idlewild play O2 ABC, Glasgow on March 7 and 8.