Bombastic Danish dreamers Oh No Ono converse with Laura Snapes.

It’d be all too convenient to be able to liken Oh No Ono’s hypnagogic sound to the fairytales of fellow Dane Hans Christian Andersen. In reality, they’re far more Grimm than that, creating terrible Freudian prog dreamlands of watery metaphors where snowy mothers melt away and a shoal of siren ballerinas lure wretched souls down to their depths. Their latest release, Eggs, is a world away from the shiny, Clor-like new wave of Yes, their second record, instead dealing in hauntingly glam, proggy Arcade Fire orchestral bombast, the most polarizing high notes since Joanna Newsom and intriguing tales of mystical tragedy, steeped in the history of the locations where it was recorded.

“We started recording on the isle of Møn in an old farmhouse,” says keyboardish Nicolai Koch, on the phone from Denmark. “Then afterwards, we went to Sweden to record some of the strings, and then to this church that we rented in Copenhagen – they have two really old church organs, that you hear clearly in the beginning of ‘The Wave Ballet’. Then we recorded ‘Beelitz’ in a disused military hospital of the same name, in Germany. I think it became a mental hospital during WW1, and it was used afterwards by the Soviet Union. Apparently Hitler had been there. We had this myth of abandoned buildings that we wanted to check out.”

Recording in these historically marked places led Oh No Ono to create a troubled landscape of their own, where stray vespers of thought marry into dreams of gravity-defying queens, gothic images of blood and bridges, of sleep and Sisyphus. At times, Malthe’s falsetto obscures the intricacy of the lyrics, adding to the fractured sense of reality abound in Eggs.

“It’s about these very unconscious thoughts that you have when you’re a child, like, ‘I would never go into the wrong house and help the wrong mother,’” says Nicolai of the fraught mother-child relationship described in ‘Icicles’. “It’s the feelings you have when you’re a kid, like when you’re in a supermarket and you pull the wrong woman’s leg to ask for something; that scary idea when you start to realise that your mother’s just another person.”

It’s fair to say that a certain Sigmund would have a field day with the lyrics on Eggs – even when they move from the dystopian fairytale landscape to fret in domesticity, they’re crossing off numbers on an imaginary psychologist’s bingo card. Take ‘Eve’, lachrymose with depths resonant of Anthony’s rich timbre, a six-minute paean to both a marriage that breaks down “before the in-laws got their pictures”, and the relationship between two robotic Pixar protagonists.

“They’re Aske’s lyrics. You know, in a way we always try to mix everything up, to give the music some sort of twist, and this song became ‘Eve’ after Aske went to see Wall-E! And he really loved that, so that’s in there as well. It’s a very serious relationship song that somehow was also inspired by this Pixar children’s movie! I think that’s a good way to see how the songs are built up.”