If you're going to cut an album that's all about capturing the energy of your performances, where else would you go than a converted water tank up in the Gold Coast hinterland near Currumbin? Well, it worked for Sydney gypsy/ska/punk four-piece Caravãna Sun.

“We'd heard about this place from a good friend of ours,” bass player Ant Beard explains of the making of second album, AYA. “It was sunk into the ground about two or three metres with some amazing walls and timber floors – it just made for absolutely amazing sound across the whole record.”

Singer Luke Carra had actually met the studio's owner and co-producer, Govinda Doyle, in WA when Doyle was on tour with Angus & Julia Stone – he'd recorded and coproduced the Stone siblings' big hit, Big Jet Plane – two years before, but after the release of their 2011 debut album Rising Falling had found themselves a little too busy to take up his offer to record at his place.

“The first time we went to Europe it was a real stab in the dark,” Beard admits of their travels through France, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal in the northern winter of 2012. “We had to sleep on a few floors and all that sort of jazz and roughed it out the first time, did the whole thing by train, but come to the last time [earlier this year], we got to go back and target those communities where the music really resonated.”

“We've always been a grass roots band and really indentify with that within ourselves and within the ethos of our music, constantly travelling to little towns across Australia where people are really feeling that live connection. If we can really focus on that as a band it's going to mean such longevity of happiness within all of us and within the music.”

Hence the desire to capture the energy of the live band, though not necessarily cutting AYA as a live album, but as live in the studio as possible. “Luke has always written a lot of the songs, but it was great to get in there amongst all of the arranging. It all stems from all four of us being together all of the time and drawing from our experiences, like travelling through Europe on the trains together and constantly having these beautiful acoustic spaces like train stations.

“Songs like [second single] Gaia, that whole earthy sort of sound and driving tone that we're going for, stem from some of these beautiful places we visited. That backbeat gypsy sort of vibe in some of our music, we played so many great gigs in the south of France where those sorts of songs really got people moving – people really felt that sort of stuff.”