If noted forecasters are to be believed, 2008 is set to be the grimmest year since history began. War, famine and pestilence are inevitable. No wonder Black Mountain’s impressively gloomy second album, In the Future, is tipped to take the Vancouver quintet into the mainstream.

It’s certainly bleak, with lyrics about angels, devils and evil tyrants that Ozzy Osbourne might have howled back in the 1970s. Several epic keyboard-led songs can comfortably be termed “heavy”.

“People have theories on how we sequenced it to reflect good and evil, but it’s really just chosen sonically. I didn’t notice until people pointed it out,” explains the band’s vocalist and leader, Stephen McBean, a slight, bearded figure sporting a woolly hat. The timeless feel isdeliberate. “It’s thicker. It has a sombre density,” says the drummer Joshua Wells. “$20,000 more density,” adds McBean, laughing.

However, the music is at least as funky as it is apocalyptic, and Black Mountain have been busily courting fans for a few years. Their cuddlier alter ego Pink Mountaintops appeared recently on a British lager commercial (“the same one the Flaming Lips did”), providing musical backing for some dancing puppets.

“It was an old song that took 20 seconds to write, but technically I guess I’ve now sold out,” McBean confesses. “But is the beer good? Yeah? That’s all right, then.”

The producer Dave Sardy commissioned the fragile ballad Stay Free for last year’s Spider-Man 3 soundtrack. “He told us, ‘You guys are so easy to record, you’ve got a great drummer, you all sing in tune, and you’re a real band.’ Well, thank you,” says McBean, sardonically.

Eighteen months ago they were picked as special guests on Coldplay’s North American arena tour.

“We ate amazingly,” recalls Wells. McBean adds: “It was one of those tours that makes your parents happy and impresses people you went to school with. A total novelty we couldn’t afford to pass up. We were so well treated. But it was kind of sterile. I understand that for their sanity they have to do it that way.”

Having seen how rock royalty live, McBean is unsure whether the prize is worth winning. “When you think about it, it makes you want to quit.

“Right now we can tour, and play intimate clubs that are packed,” he says, “None of us really has the personality to put on a show like Marilyn Manson or Axl Rose running about. Even Chris Martin had a platform where he would go out and kneel down in front of the crowd. I could never do that.” He shakes his head. “I wish I had a touch of that Frank Sinatra performer to me but I don’t. My guitar is my little Linus blanket.”

Old enough to recall when classic rock ruled, the 38-year-old McBean is nostalgic for a time when artists retained some mystery. “There was no YouTube to blow Led Zeppelin’s image. All you knew was what you saw live and stories you heard about sharks and groupies.

“That mystery is not even long gone. Dinosaur Jr still had that in the late 1980s. I was obsessed with them.”

He worries that the internet has taken the fun out of fandom. “In the 1980s I used to tape trade all round the world sending death metal cassettes to people in Brazil or Japan.

Now it’s just the click of a button,” he says. “I deleted our MySpace page and got into trouble with the record company.”

“We’re not 21. If we were then we’d probably have a coke habit and talk about being the biggest band around,” says McBean.

The band know all about narcotics – thanks to three members working with hard-drug users in a controversial yet successful programme in Vancouver called Insite. Catastrophic HIV infection rates there have fallen dramatically. Even now, McBean, who followed bassist Matt Camirand into the job, still works often enough to retain his position.

“I’ve never been a heroin addict, but I have known some,” he says. “It’s about how you relate to people who are down and out.”

McBean’s own experiences left a mark. “I was a slightly troubled youth,” he says, “I had completely loving parents but we didn’t always see eye to eye. I ended up living on the street for a while.”

Now he enjoys hellraising vicariously. “I’m getting into Oasis. I love the Morning Glory album. At the time I thought ‘Who are these w******? They sound like Bryan Adams.’

“But that whole thing of being so conceited doesn’t fit into any of our worlds now,” says McBean. “After being so mad for so many years, music is the last place where I want to be angry. It’s too easy. I know it too well.”

In the Future is out now on Jagjaguwar

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