Eight years after taking a break to pursue solo projects and enjoy a break from their hectic schedule Embrace are back.

Their first tour in seven years, showcasing their new self-titled album, rolls into the Bournemouth O2 Academy on Thursday, November 27.

After topping the charts in 1998 with debut album The Good Will Out, the band went on to have two more No 1 albums and six top ten singles.

By the time they recorded the official England World Cup 2006 song, World At Your Feet, they were on a roll.

Then all went quiet.

Asked what has kept them so long, singer Danny McNamara said: “We literally stopped everything.

We didn’t play any gigs, didn’t write any songs.

I couldn’t even look at my guitar.

I just got to the end of the road with it all.

The last album was really successful, we’d become successful commercially, but that ran away with itself and left the music behind.

We were playing a massive festival and I felt the most disassociated I’d ever felt.

The rest of the band had that to different degrees, too.

He adds: “I became disillusioned with the whole thing, but the bug comes back.

"Rich got it first. He was working in a studio, and wrote some stuff that sounded like nothing we’d ever done before, then I started writing again and it all spiralled from there.

“That was five years ago and we’ve been writing since then.

"We only finished the album earlier this year, which is a weird feeling because I’d been saying the album would be ready ‘in a month’ for the last five years.”

Danny says he knew the time was right “to make something better than our first album”.

“I think we’ve done that.

"I think the fourth album Out Of Nothing is really good, and there is obviously some good stuff on the others, but this new one I think is great.

“If someone asked me what we were about as a band, I’d play them All You Good Good People or Ashes from our back catalogue, then I’d play the whole of the new album.

"That tells you what I think of it,” he says.

Now following festival dates in the summer the band are making their presence felt again.