The 4 of Us' latest album marks the acclaimed band’s tenth. It’s taken them as many years to make it.

Good things - as the schmaltzy affirmation hanging in your mother's kitchen notes - take time, and Crescent Nights stands as an assured, delicately-crafted collection of acoustic rock, detailing brothers Brendan and Declan Murphy’s formative years in Newry.

In between filming music videos as an astronaut and preparing for a string of upcoming live shows, Brendan, the band's primary lyricist, explains what’s making him so dewy-eyed.

“Being 62,” he says. “That might have something to do with it.’

Since he brought it up, where does his record-making mindset lie as a sexagenarian?

“In some ways you have everything to prove, because the perceived wisdom is that artists peak creatively in their 20s,” Murphy explains. “There's no getting away from it. There's a few notable exceptions, but for the most part, that's the case. So I want to buck that trend with us and I want people to look back and go ‘Well, there's just no question that their most interesting exciting stuff that they produced later on in their career.’”

Crescent Nights could very well do just that. The album goes beyond a coming-of-age story. The backdrop of the Troubles adds a dramatic subplot to the youthful revelry, as exemplified by the gushingly romantic title track - an ode to a beloved Belfast pub the brothers frequented during their university days.

“Nostalgia plays a big part in songwriting, whether it’s Van Morrison singing about Cypress Avenue or the Beatles singing about Penny Lane,” Murphy says. “The question is, how far back are you going to go?

“The choices were severely limited [for a night out]. They literally locked up the city. You couldn't get in after dark so the only place that was really happening at all was the student area.

“The Crescent Bar was a rite of passage for all students. It didn't matter what religion you were. Sandy Row was a dangerous place, but nobody got hurt. People were staggering home after a night out in the Crescent and nothing bad happened.”

The tight, J.J Cale-flavoured groove of the aptly named ‘Night Out of Town’ meanwhile, underpins a tale of teenagers swapping pounds for punts for an evening.

“As soon as you got across the border it was the Wild West in a really great way,” Murphy notes.

“The irony was the roads got worse. In a funny way, we sort of felt sorry for people in the South because even though we had the Troubles, their TV wasn't very good. The Angelus interrupted everything - and couldn't get a condom to save your life.

“The Catholic church had a tighter grip on the South than it did on the North, for obvious reasons. So when we went down there, it seemed like a more innocent part of the world. That's all changed now. It's sort of gone the other way.”

While originally from a catholic majority border town in the North, Murphy has been based in Dublin and Louth for much of his adult life. Has living here changed his perspective on the environment he grew up?

“When the band started we'd go outside this country and all you would get asked about was the Troubles,” he says. “And I used to get really defensive about it because the fact is that we had a great time growing up. We had a great childhood, great teenage years, despite all that.

“It was all we knew. It became normalised. It's taken years for me to actually process it and see it the way outsiders saw it. Whereas now I have children and they walk the same streets that I walked as a kid. It's a completely different experience when they're in the North. Newry is a completely different town now."

On the subject of child-rearing, the Crescent Nights tracks ‘Carry Me To The Water’ and ‘Hurt People’ cast a poignant eye on Murphy's own parents, and the heavy responsibilities involved with raising a family during the Troubles.

“They really were the heroes,” he says. “Because they were trying to create a sense of normality, when there was nothing really normal about what was going on at all. I'm a father myself now, so I have a profound sense of what they must have endured.”

Things aren’t necessarily ‘normal’ these days either, with post-Brexit complications, parliamentary deadlocks and a litany of scandals making up the bulk of news stories coming from the North. What does Murphy make of it all?

“It's a bit bewildering, really,” he reflects. “But on the other hand, I'm so grateful for the Good Friday Agreement. I'm so grateful that the peace lines are now a tourist attraction. It was inconceivable even as late as the mid-90s, that there’d be American and Japanese tourists driving along all those flashpoints in Belfast.

“So for me, it really does seem confined to history. It doesn't feel like it could ever flare up again, regardless of the fact that politically, it seems at a constant sort of standstill. The fact is that the violence has ended. That's really what 99.9% of the people who live there and went through that experience wanted.”

Keeping it in the family, at the heart of the 4 of Us’ enduring career is the fraternal partnership between Brendan and his brother, Declan.

“He's the technical one and I'm the not-technical one,” the former says. “He's the patient one and I'm the impatient one. I've just realised I'm not coming out good out of this…

“I take care of the vocal melodies and lyrics and Declan takes care of a lot of the music that supports it. The main thing is that we both have the same idea as to what works.
He matches my weaknesses and I think I match his pretty well. We'd be hopping on one leg, each of us, without the other.”

On a final note, our chat takes place in the middle of ‘Awards Season’, with the Grammys seeing the usual suspects sweeping up at a glamorous, yet increasingly predictable, ceremony.

The 4 of Us are no strangers to red carpets and miniature trophies. Their double-platinum debut, Songs for the Tempted, earned them Best Album of the Year at the Irish Music Awards in 1989, ahead of the likes of U2. Does Murphy place much value in these accolades?

“No. Awards, by and large, are political in the small p sense of the word,” he says. “A lot of my favourite records never won awards. So I don't pay much attention. But there was a time when I did. There was a time when it seemed to matter more and it seemed like it was everything.

“It was either music or football. That was it in school. And I don't feel like that is the way it is with teenagers now. I mean, we didn't have anywhere near the amount of entertainment options.

“30 years ago it seemed to matter more, but even then, once you've been in the industry and been in major labels, you learn what it's all tied up with.”

• The 4 of Us play Whelan's on February 21 and the Moat Theatre in Nass on March 1. For more information, click here. Crescent Nights is out now.