It’s hard to entirely get over ‘The Good Fish Guide’, an old Stornoway track from an early release, such are the fears of smugness and comedy music that it generated and that still linger to this day. Still, it’s been around half a decade since that song and You Don’t Know Anything, the band’s most recent (November 2013) release and, well, perhaps it’s time to move on.

This is a band that have never previously seemed desperate to tweak noses with their music, instead sticking to a tried and tested path of clean, clear, folk-meets-pop, polite-sounding music. To their credit it’s seen them do exceptionally well, extending their reach beyond the usual ‘local band’ status and seeing them signed to 4AD, touring nationally and beyond, playing major shows and racking up plaudits all over the place.

It’s a pleasing time, then, for this six-song EP to see Stornoway going – for want of a better phrase – a bit weird. Sure, they still place their idiosyncratic, crystal-clear harmonised vocals front and centre, backed with music that’s now so well-performed and well-assembled that it sounds like the pure sound of über-rehearsed pop, rather than a conglomerate of instruments. From the confused, stop-start opening to ‘When You Touch Down From Outer Space’, through the faltering, almost Young Knives-like oddpop of ‘The Sixth Wave’ to final track ‘Clockwatching’, a jaunty operetta of a song that chucks sax, noise breakdowns and rolling organ melodies into a high velocity mix, You Don’t Know Anything is the fulfilling sound of a band that knows what they’re doing and is having some fun tinkering around the edges of the image they’ve built for themselves.

This is still an accessible and mainstream-friendly set of songs – Stornoway are savvy enough to stick close to what people like them for – and it’s not the sign of a band either falling apart, breaking down or freaking out. As a whole, though, these six songs might just expunge the memory of ‘The Good Fish Guide’ and reboot Stornoway as a classy indie-pop band with a twisted sense of humour.