The legacy that the Pixies left on the history of rock'n'roll music during their initial tenure spanning the '80s and '90s is undeniable. The ongoing reunion tour that they'd been conducting on a massive scale since reforming in 2004, however, had to eventually result in some new music lest the entire thing lapse into an exercise in base nostalgia or, even worse, pastiche.

With that in mind in October 2012 the iconic four-piece – frontman and creative font Charles “Black Francis” Thompson, charismatic bassist/backing vocalist Kim Deal, guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer David Lovering – decamped to Rockfield Studios in Wales to lay down new material with former production flame Gil Norton for what would become their fifth studio album proper, and their first since 1991'a Trompe le Monde.

One night early in the piece the band dined together at a restaurant and randomly Deal picked up the tab – by all accounts a rare occurrence. Then the very next morning she approached her bandmates in a coffee shop near the studio and dropped the bombshell that she was flying home the following day – she was leaving the sessions without completing her bass parts, and for all intents and purposes quitting the band.

The impact was seismic and for a while the entire future of this massively influential band was at a crossroads. After a few days of mourning the remaining members offered a collective shrug, rolled up their sleeves and re-entered the fray in the studio. The result was the first album of the Pixies' second career phase, Indie Cindy, released somewhat unusually as a series of standalone EPs before last month's unveiling in conventional album form.

“There was obviously an element of surprise,” Santiago recalls of Deal's dramatic departure. “It came out of the blue, but the thing that derailed us was, 'Why did she leave?' And the other question was, 'What the hell are going to do?' But after a while, it became apparent that we had these half-finished songs when she left – these half-baked songs – and we had to finish them. But kudos to her.

“The four songs that we'd already tracked down and she'd finished the bass parts on, we ended up having to replace them for one reason or another – I don't know, some legal stuff – but the recording process surprisingly didn't end up changing that much. We had to lay down guitars and the vocals – that's it. That's what we do, so whether she hangs around or not we were going to do that anyway.

“It was an easy decision to keep going. At one time Charles was kicking around the idea – not me – of continuing this recording but changing our name, changing the project so that instead of the Pixies it was something else. I said, 'What's the point of that? We're still going to sound like the Pixies!' To my mind there was absolutely no point in doing that.”

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