What he did think about was contact – how sound is made by bodies in space, not boxes in series. He banned pedals. Banned reverb on the amps too. Not as purism but as a way of forcing touch. Set the amps hot enough that if someone digs in, the amp breaks up; record at a volume where the room itself starts to saturate. If you’re pressing a pedal, he says, the pedal is doing the work for you – and for this music, he needed the energy of people physically making sound. You can hear the choice in the grain of it: tones leaning into each other, tiny sways where guitars braid, the sympathetic ring that only arrives when edges aren’t buffered. When he talks about guitar, his references land on people, not styles. Lydia Lunch for the refusal to hide. Tara Cunningham for that same directness – he’d been listening for years; a trio with Caius Williams and Steve Noble sealed it. Simon Tong is another kind of presence: quiet until the exact idea clicks, and then you can’t imagine the song without it. Time and groove arriving like a decision.

If A Short Diary (ECM) was a private notation of loss, Finding Ways turns outward – charged and physical. The intimacy now isn’t hush but proximity. Most of it is live takes. Ninety-five per cent unedited. They just played. John Parish overdubbed his parts later, but the spine is the room. What’s there in that moment is the truth of it. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, that’s still a feeling. That phrase – still a feeling – sits quietly at the centre. He thinks about composition, about shape, but when the red light is on, the point is intuition: take the risk, don’t judge it. The technical thinking has already happened at home. In the room you trust the trained instinct and you play. The word play sounds small, almost fragile, but in his mouth it becomes a form of defiance. The record holds a tension between control and surrender, fear and joy, knowing and letting go. Meaning isn’t found in precision; it lives in contact itself – pressure moved, vibration felt, presence made audible.

People anchor these songs. One piece asks directly: Who’s your person? He thinks of his grandfather – ‘my Indian grandpa’ – who spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war in Japan and came home without bitterness. The family still has his written accounts. If he could come through that and remain gentle, Seb says, then whatever challenges arrive they can be met with the same quiet strength. Friendship sits in the same circle. He would meet Patrick Walden, whom he had known since 2004. Not to workshop songs, just to be near each other: King’s Cross walks, food, cinema, the relief of unforced company. When he was low, time with Patrick brought joy. Patrick had been meant to record on the album but went into hospital; later, Seb got him to overdub on a separate track from the same period. Patrick died not long after. ‘He was one of my finding ways,’ Seb says. The music holds his echo – the trace of a conversation that didn’t end so much as continue without speech.

There’s gentleness across the record, but it isn’t soft. The light here is patient – built from raw guitar tone and the dry breath of drums. It moves with an open gait, forward but never hurried. You can hear musicians listening, leaving space for one another: the sound of people not perfecting something but staying together long enough for the room to remember them. That openness isn’t a pose; it’s biography. He grew up where being into different things was normal – nine siblings, each tuned differently. From his mum: Nina Simone, Keith Jarrett, a lot of Bill Evans. She taught him to listen deep. She’d hand over an album and ask him to come back and talk about it. In her last years, mostly in bed, those debriefs became ritual. She died when he was eighteen. His dad put on Thomas Tallis and Bach on Sunday mornings – a domestic liturgy you can almost hear in how Seb thinks about tone and space. The siblings spread out across scenes – punk, psych, goth, biker, Nick Cave – difference wasn’t divergence; it was home.

So the ‘guitar record’ isn’t a heel-turn so much as a change in palette. He sees it as his music, continuous with the rest. He’s curious about what multiple guitars do together – how intonation rubs and sympathetic noise behave in shared atmosphere – and he wants to remove the crutches that make those interactions too safe. Not a ‘guitar album’ so much as a study in touch: what touch does to space; what space does to time.

Between sessions and on days off he walks galleries, not to mine references but to recalibrate. Sometimes he needs to see something that shifts him a little, something that reminds him there’s another way to look. Laurie Anderson in Sweden blew him away – the width of her mediums. A friend took him to the Tate to see Emily Kam Kngwarray and he’s still processing it. So much received that isn’t being told to you. His great-grandmother is Aboriginal; he doesn’t know that culture, but in Australia something in him is struck, as if a dormant frequency wakes.