“Ah, geez,” exclaims Augie March’s drummer Dave Williams. The normally verbose frontman for Melbourne’s finest is, seemingly, for once at a loss for words. His normal witty repartee has been lost, all over one little adjective beginning with R.

And why? Well, it comes down to a theory. If the band’s debut Sunset Studies was ramshackle, follow-up Strange Bird nothing short of rambunctious, and the long-delayed turned calling card Moo, You Bloody Choir decidedly refined, what, pray tell, is fourth album Watch Me Disappear?

“Raucous?” Dave ponder. “Nah, I’d hardly call it raucous. How about restrained?”

True, it is somewhat restrained in comparison with the band’s aforementioned output – there’s something about Watch Me Disappear that feels like the band were out to create something with a set purpose. It’s ended up not just being refined, but also resplendent.

“It was probably part of working with Joe,” he says of the band’s choice of producer this time around, which saw them teaming with American producer Joe Chicarelli, who has previously helmed albums by the likes of The Shins and My Morning Jacket, “and us wanting to commit to tape fully-realised ideas with no clutter.”

The band’s aim for Watch Me Disappear was to get to the essence of the song, and if that meant stripping back then so be it. A leaner, meaner and keener Augie March is heard on this album, with the impact nothing short of astounding on the likes of the chilling ‘The Slant’.

“That actual version,” Dave says of the stripped-back and bare-bones album highlight, “is the one that Glenn recorded as a demo. You’re hearing it three hours old in a room. That’s why it sounds great.”

The magic of it is in the simplicity – it unfurls from a simple acoustic guitar to incorporate a restrained (there’s that word again) keyboard from Kiernen Box, putting the focus firmly on frontman Glenn Richards’ spellbinding lyrical tale of a prisoner in Tasmania. In many ways it’s a kindred brother to the epic ‘Sixteen Straws’, the closing number on fellow Melbourne troupe the Drones album Gala Mill.

Like that band, there’s something about Augie March that sets them apart from many of their contemporaries, with Richards’ vocals and magisterial command of language a vital component of the band’s slow-build success. He weaves tales that take the listener on a journey, and crafts stories that are nothing short of captivating. While his voice become much more of a focal point in the sound of the band as their career has progressed over the last twelve years, it’s the band’s ability to craft a genuinely winsome pop song – be it ‘Farmer’s Son’ or the single ‘Pennywhistle’ – around his words that has developed slowly but surely over time.

“I’d put it to you,” Dave wades in, “that we started doing that on the last record with some songs, and internally within the band I feel like we’re not fucking around – we’re getting good strong ideas down and working on getting really strong ideas around the vocal and just really supporting that.”

Dave explains that, as the backbone of the group, that the creative process has always been about moving forward, growing, changing, and getting better. Of the new album’s more restrained sound, he argues that it’s just a natural extension of that – of working hard and really refining things but also trying not to lose sight of the raggedness that is such a key element to Augie March. “Those two diametrically opposed things – you’re trying to get somewhere in the middle of it.”

Is it a difficult balance?

“Bloody oath it is!” Dave explodes. “There’s times going in when it’s almost like equating going into a studio to record a record with going to war – the songs are your soldiers and some of them don’t come back! They did a good job, but the they just weren’t strong enough, or something happened. You just try and find and get to the heart of the song and really present that bit – tear back all of the bullshit and the fluff, and just present the heart of the song.”

Yet on their first two albums in particular those ‘wounded soldiers’ were not just there on the record, but celebrated and part of the very fabric of the success of the releases. “The way we worked with them was great,” he says of their early recordings, “and how we can improve on things that we didn’t quite make on this one. You do get better at it – you hope you do anyway, because it’d be heartbreaking if you didn’t – but you definitely get better getting my parts happening more, and be a bit more truthful with them.”

Watch Me Disappear has also had the fastest turnaround for album recording to release for the band – normally there have been incessant delays and refinements in the creation of Augie March albums. Dave outlines that this was a deliberate step that the band wanted to take: “That was a big thing we really wanted to have happen. We’ve been ashamed at our one album every three years cycle, and it might still be that, but we’re getting older and we want to be able to get a few more out before we drop off the perch.”

It’s also significantly shorter than their first three records – a pattern that has repeated with nearly every release. Perhaps as they get older (and wiser), their albums are getting tighter because the songs that don’t fit the mood or aesthetic that they’re going for are cast to the wayside – indeed, what strikes most loudly about this album is the flow and cohesion of it.

“”This one was another ‘let’s try and put the ones out there that really hit the mark or got really close’,” he explains of Watch Me Disappear, “and to be honest with you I probably wanted to cut one or two more. But hey, that’s what happens in a democracy.”