The world may be changing but the niceties of selling music online have so far passed Brakes by. “We did feel a bit guilty about our first album,” admits Eamon Hamilton, the band’s 31-year-old singer and lyricist. “At least for people downloading from iTunes who had paid 79p to get Comma, Comma, Comma, Full Stop: it lasts four seconds!” The Brighton quartet are not given to overelaboration. They have just released their second album, the excellent Beatific Visions, yet the total length of their catalogue so far hardly exceeds the duration of a train ride from the capital to their home town.

“They’re not deliberately the same length,” the guitarist Tom White clarifies, in case their second 29-minute album appeared planned. “The number of tracks is different.”

The band came together almost by accident. Hamilton, from Gloucestershire, was the keyboard player for those local heroes British Sea Power. White and his drumming brother Alex were, and remain, the core of Electric Soft Parade, Mercury nominees while they were still teenagers. Marc Beatty, the bassist, played in the Tenderfoot and ran a local studio.

Hamilton had been trawling his unusually pointed songs, such as the memorably sardonic Heard about Your Band, in local venues.

“It shouldn’t have worked,” says Tom, at 22 the youngest member and a big fella who brings to mind a healthy Pete Doherty. “Me and Alex had seen Eamon around Brighton, playing most of the songs on the first album, just acoustic guitar and vocals. But there was an attitude there that could hold its own in front of a full band.”

“The first time we got together it sounded so ace, so great,” Hamilton reminisces. The resulting album, Give Blood, in 2005, featured sarky disco-rock alongside punchy punk-pop, cheerful country duets, the odd fierce political rant and some genuine wit. Many people thought it was great. Rough Trade store in London (no longer related to Brakes’ record label) declared it their album of the year.

This time around they recorded in Nashville at House of David, the studio owned by David Briggs, once Elvis Presley’s pianist and a local fixture. Briggs started out in the Muscle Shoals rhythm section and even backed the Sixties star Tommy Roe on a trip to the UK with a Liverpool band.

“He had some good stories about going on tour with the Beatles,” Hamilton says. “He went to George Harrison’s house and kept finding rooms Harrison hadn’t even been to.

“He was saying: ‘These are really great songs,’ and to hear that from a man who played with Elvis and Sammy Davis Jr is pretty cool.”

Briggs is right, though. The title track and the heartbreaking closer No Return are worth a thousand overlong CDs.

When not recording, they spent time with their labelmate Cerys Matthews and her American husband Seth Riddle. “It was brilliant, sitting on porches, musicians coming round and playing songs outside. I really loved that. I’d always dreamt of swapping lyrics and chords, and there we were, doing it,” Hamilton says.

“Parts of Nashville were rough, though,” Tom says. “We saw this guy running down the street holding his waistband, and Seth just said: ‘See how he’s holding his gun steady’.”

Today, drinking in a pub on the very street where they found their name (after Beatty watched an out-of- control cyclist yell “I have no brakes!” as he ploughed through the milling crowds), the pair are celebrating the midterm election results. The United States still fascinates. “I’ve been reading Hunter Thompson a lot lately and I love his love of America, and of individualism over collectivism,” says Hamilton. “Of course when you see America everyone’s kind of the same — I see more individuals in Brighton than New York. But I do love the idea of it.”

They protest, but Brakes don’t seem to realise quite how odd they are. “I think we are quite a traditional set-up,” White says. “There’s no style here at all.” “I’m realising more and more that we are an old-school band,” Hamilton adds. “The Nashville players really appreciated that, I think. We are what they were.”

But this band hoped to chart with an 80-second single, and that wasn’t even their shortest. They will happily discuss the state of the bothies on the West Highland long-distance walk. They write lyrics inspired by a specific chapter of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita then have their photo taken staring at the similarly named cocktail. They seem to exist in a world apart from conventional bands. No wonder the Killers, friends since touring with British Sea Power, appreciate them enough to invite them on their current tour.

Hamilton understands that their didactic popular music is out of step. “Right now bands have become more of an insular commodity. If you don’t hear what you want to hear, you have to make it yourself. Brakes fills the gap,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It’s quite a pleasure writing ‘musician’ down as your occupation, though.”

They enjoy the opportunities the lifestyle affords, whether handing a “rancid, badly rolled” smoke to Neil Tennant at a festival (which he accepted with the words “Welcome home!”) or discovering the existence of a secret Proclaimer (“There’s a third one! They’re identical triplets!” Hamilton claims).

“A lot of bands are too happy to be told what category they fit in,” White says. “But I don’t think we can. We don’t look right for this era.”

Hamilton prefers to quote the old Kit Kat advertisement. “You look bad, you sound terrible — you’ll go a long way,” he laughs, not caring.

Brakes are on tour with the Killers. Beatific Visions is out now on Rough Trade. The single Hold Me in the River is released on Dec 4. Brakes start their own UK tour on Nov 28 in Cardiff (www.brakesbrakesbrakes.com)