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Northwest garage-rock pioneers The Sonics never made much commercial headway during their initial stint in the '60s, but their uncompromising brand of three-chord rock'n'roll influenced generations of artists to follow, with everyone from Nirvana to The Stooges to The White Stripes to Bruce Springsteen citing them as a sonic touchstone.

In 2007 they reunited for the Cavestomp garage festival in Brooklyn and have been thrilling new waves of fans with their vigorous live show and timeless tunes ever since. Then last year they upped the ante by releasing This Is The Sonics - their first album of new material in almost 50 years - and the big surprise wasn't that it happened, but how raw and vital these new songs and recordings sounded.

"[adopts carny voice] 'Here they are, The Sonics, playing the hits of the '60s!' I didn't want to do that."

"It's a direct reflection on Jim Diamond who produced it," offers founding saxophonist Rob Lind. "We'd never used a producer before so you get in the studio and everyone's got their own idea and egos start happening, and people are saying, 'I think we should do this', 'No, I think it would be better if we bring in a string section'. He'd done The White Stripes and he knew us quite well, and he was recommended to us, and so he came up to Seattle a week before we were going to go into the studio, and we rehearsed every night and he came to the rehearsals with a legal pad and just took notes.

"We put up something like 20 songs at the end of that and he said, 'These are the ones we're going to do, and these are the ones we're not going to do', and when we went in the studio his idea was - he verbalised it - 'I don't want to copy the old days, but I want to try to get the energy and the fire that you guys had on those first two albums back in the '60s'. So it was nice because we didn't have to think, and he was always right! We played the songs on the album but he was the film director.

"Although we always play with energy, no matter the age of the people in the band like me, we always play hard. So when we went in there it wasn't like we were looking at each other going, 'Okay guys, let's play with energy!' That's just the way we do it, so that kind of came naturally."

And after years touring the old hits, Lind says it's great to have new Sonics tunes in the repertoire again.

"Actually, that's why we did it," he smiles. "I didn't want to be an oldies but goodies band - I didn't want to be a retro band, [adopts carny voice] 'Here they are, The Sonics, playing the hits of the '60s!' I didn't want to do that. We're always going to do Psycho and Strychnine and The Witch and Shot Down and Boss Hoss — those'll always be in there — but now we have all of these songs off the new album and it's so much fun having those in there too."