After bringing in the New Year at the Falls Festival in Lorne, and setting off on an overseas tour, RÜFÜS are back in Australia for the release of their second album Bloom. With the infamous Coachella 2016 in their sights as well as the, and an international tour, 2016 is already shaping up to be a big one for the trio.

We caught up with the indie-electronic outfit’s keyboardist, Jon George, to chat about the year ahead.

You’ve just got back into the country after your a massive world tour. How was it?

It was awesome! We had such a great time flying around Australia and then over to America and London for a few weeks. The most amazing thing was seeing some of the reactions to our performance. We were playing Innerbloom and Say a Prayer for Me before they were even released, and people were into it and reacting so strongly to what we were playing which was great.

Where was the best audience? Did any crazy stories come out of the tour?

It’s always pretty awesome playing at home – even though the audiences in America and New York were amazing. The Enmore in Sydney has always been my favourite place to perform. I grew up going to gigs there, so and it means a lot to me to be able to play it.

During our last performance there my friend actually proposed to his girlfriend in the audience so we stopped for that to happen – which was pretty amazing!

Playing to thousands of captivated people is always pretty an incredible experience. I actually missed my sisters 21st Birthday when we were in America, so we recorded a message with a crowd of the 2,000 people there in the audience wishing her a happy birthday.

With Falls Festival behind you and Coachella coming up in April you must be pretty excited…What’s your ultimate goal for the 2016? Is there anywhere you dream of performing? Where do you want to perform by the end of the year?

Everything is going so well at the moment. Coachella is such a massive gig so that’s really exciting! It looks like we will be going back and forth from Australia to America to perform this year. We will also be performing in countries we haven’t been – like Italy and Spain – so there are lots of exciting things coming up.

Congratulations on the upcoming release of Bloom. Tell us a bit about the album.

Thanks! I guess we toured for two years after Atlas so we were really excited to get back into the studio to write and produce some new music. We started in a small town in the UK where we were in between festivals, and then we went over to Berlin and wrote a whole heap of material over the following 3 three months. To produce the sound for this album we drew inspiration for the album’s sound from by listening to George FitzGerald, David August and Bob Moses to produce the sound for this album… It’s kind of like a full-bodied electronic hug, I guess.

You guys wrote, created and produced the entire album yourselves. Tell us about the challenges you faced.

I have a degree in audio engineering… (which helps!) and I try to teach the boys everything I know. We all kind of push each other in the studio – which is definitely a big part of the process. We recorded a gospel choir ourselves and basically recorded anything and everything to perfect our sound, effects and results.

I absolutely love your song Innerbloom, however at 9mins 38secs it’s a really long song. Why create such a long track? How does the length of this add to the listener’s experience?

We really wanted to try and not restrict ourselves. The only reason it seems long is because people are used to three-minute radio tracks. We busted out this song and it does exactly what we wanted it to.

Basically, this was an indulgent moment for us to explore, experiment and have fun with it. The whole point of the song is to get lost in it and, I guess, if you’re sitting there looking at your watch, then maybe this isn’t the song for you!

RÜFÜS’ second album, Bloom, is released Friday 22 January. Available via iTunes.