From panoramic vistas from the peaks of stately Yorkshire ridges to drug-running ranches inthe deserts of Texas, The Chevin are a band steeped in natural grandeur. They’re a band whogrew up relishing the magnificent swathes of moorland stretching from York to Leeds visiblefrom atop the hill overlooking their home town of Otley – the geological marvel after whichthey’re named – and instinctively destined to recreate the wonder of it in music.

“Otley sits in a valley in Wharfdale and the hill on one side of the valley is The Chevin,” singerand songwriter Coyle Girelli explains. “I like the romance of naming ourselves after somethingso local and personal, and at the same time it creates an image of being stood on the edge ofa ridge or a cliff looking out.

If you go up into the hills, you can see all the way to York on oneside and as far as the eye can see on the other. When you write without being contrived you’redirectly influenced by your surroundings and growing up in a place with such a wide landscapewe naturally go towards that sort of feeling.

”As a teenager, roaming the tiny market town of Otley in The Chevin’s shadow with a head full ofNirvana, Oasis and The Beatles, Coyle had a soundtrack to his life spooling constantly throughhis head.

“I was constantly singing music to myself when I was playing, everything always hada soundtrack attached. I guess it was a natural place I was heading, I was constantly writingmelody and words for as long as I can remember, without realising.

Nirvana was the firstthing that made me want to be in a band. The first album I got was ’In Utero’ and I rememberlistening to it all the way through, and Nirvana strike a chord with a lot of teenagers but it reallyspoke to me personally.

I’d loved other music but that was the first time that something hadhit deep. After that I bought ‘Nevermind’ and I was hooked. The idea of being in a band wassomething that was formed from really getting deep into the songs, really starting to analysethe songs and the words.

”Surprisingly, Otley proved to be a hotbed for 90s-inspired rock hopefuls, and Coyle and hisguitarist schoolmate Mat Steel began writing and playing in a variety of musical incarnationsfrom the age of 12, eventually graduating to the lively live scene of Leeds.

It wasn’t until thestart of 2010, though, that Coyle, Mat and their regular bassist Jon Langford chanced uponfellow Otley drummer Mal Taylor and Coyle felt the band was right to record the album’s worthof songs he’d been hoarding for his big push.

Enormous rock songs with the clout and sizzleof early U2, The Killers and Coldplay, but also with the cultish edge of Band Of Horses andArcade Fire. Uplifting desert air punchers like ‘Champion’ and ‘Blue Eyes’, piano-led paeansto nature’s wonders like ‘Beautiful World’, rousing rock wreckages like ‘Drive’ (in which amourning Coyle fantasises about crashes, both physical and emotional), synth disco stompslike ‘Colours’ and tangled relationship elegies such as ‘Dirty Little Secret’ and ‘Love Is Just AGame’ that hinted at messy affairs and youthful promiscuity.

Songs that retained their style andstature while swerving between the defiant and the devastated, a reflection of Coyle’s mindsetat the time.“The last few years has been a time of break-ups and I’ve had some close friends pass awayas well as family,” says Coyle.

“Throughout writing the album, it was a time of loss. ‘So LongSummer’ is a good closer because it sums it up more than any other. It’s an uplifting song butthe lyrics are about losing someone close.

That sums the album up lyrically – melodically it’squite uplifting, but the undertone is constantly sad. These songs, personally for me, were verytherapeutic, and I hope for other people they are too.

”Demoing the entire album on Coyle’s home studio (recordings The Chevin were so pleasedwith that they kept many of the original keyboard tracks for the finished album) and usingthem to lure in a manager, the band concentrated on perfecting their songs in rehearsal ratherthan playing live and opted for the increasingly fashionable approach of self-financing theirdebut album and approached LA producer Noah Shain early in 2011 to find them a studio asdramatic and dislocated as their music and origins required.

“I wanted to find somewhere in a forest or somewhere where we’d be split off from anydistraction or outside influence for three and a half weeks,” says Coyle. “He found this placeout in the desert of El Paso in South Texas.

The story of the ranch is pretty crazy, it’s right onthe Mexican border and there’s a history of arms running and drug running but the ranch isnow a pecan farm so he makes his money from that and puts it into buying insane vintagegear.

It was this old ranch building they’d turned into a studio and anything you ever want isthere, vintage guitars, mandolins, baby pianos, everything was there. We were able to go thereand completely lose ourselves in the middle of the desert for almost a month.

The experiencewas pretty mind-altering in a lot of ways, it maybe even widened the sound a little more. Youopened the door and all you could see was desert. It was completely insane. When we hada bit of time off the owner of the ranch came down and made us fire guns into the desert tomake us feel Texan.

”Between taking pot-shots at cacti, The Chevin recorded thirteen songs, working relentlessly ongetting the perfect Peter Gabriel drum sound for ‘Dirty Little Secret’ and luring in local membersof the El Paso Philharmonic Orchestra to add strings to the ever-expanding pop monster thatwas ‘Champion’, the song that would become the lead track on their debut EP that October.

They emerged with a “very rich, ambitious album” that may well kick-start a revival in properlyproduced rock. “It’s quite rich sonically,” Coyle explains, “and that’s something that’s comingback more and more over the last year, which is good.

Maybe it’s a reaction to how easy it’s gotto make music on a computer in your bedroom. It’s nice to hear so much music recently whereyou can tell it’s recorded in a studio and the takes are live and there’s some thought that’s goneinto the sound, it’s not just a plug-in.

”The album certainly turned ears. Fierce Panda heard it and offered them a record contract,starting with the ravenously received ‘Champion EP’; US contacts heard it at Statesideshowcase gigs and built an American team around them; The Airborne Toxic Event heard itand took them on the road around the UK for a month; The Pigeon Detectives heard it andoffered them a 16-date tour of Europe at the start of 2012, sharing their tourbus.

And WhiteLies heard it, came down to catch them on their UK headline club tour towards the end of 2011and invited The Chevin to support them on their winter arena tour, culminating at WembleyArena: “an amazing experience.

It was weird, once we were onstage and the place was prettymuch full, it’s one of my favourite gigs ever. It’s great as a support band but as a headliner I’msure it’s better. It’s something to tick off on the list.

”So even before their show-stopping performances at SXSW 2012, The Chevin were beinggiven glimpses of the big time. All that remained was to put the finishing touches to theirimmense debut album – the shimmering, propulsive, organ-drenched centrepiece and titletrack ‘Borderland’, an Arcade Fire-esque epic recorded at Shain’s LA studio early in 2012 butinspired by the El Paso recording stint that brought out Coyle’s inner Springsteen/Morricone.

“Where the studio is situated, it sits right on the Mexican/American border,” he says. “You canliterally walk for five minutes and hit the big black fence that Cheney put up a few years ago.The song can be taken a couple of ways.

When I wrote it it was a little bit about the borderwar, the almost moral war that goes on at that and many other borders around the world, butsubconsciously it was about coming through a period and being re-awoken.

”