Sleep Thieves' earliest musical memories range from Keith playing Feed the World on a tennis racket, to Sorcha finding out Santa wasn’t real thanks to the early delivery of a piano, and the Christmas miracle of midi-effects being bestowed upon Wayne on a Casio keyboard cartridge.

“I used to go around the house making up songs and singing to myself - before I could even reach up, I used to play the piano,” says lead singer Sorcha.

“I was actually in a band before I could play guitar,” notes Keith, recounting his first tentative steps towards becoming a musician. “We were terrible," he scoffs. “My dad played guitar so it was an easy decision, ‘there’s a guitar there, show me how to play it.’ Another friend’s granddad was a bassist so he wanted to be a bassist, but everybody wanted to be a drummer because they thought girls came along with it.”

“Sorcha knows all about that,” he says with a wry smile. “I do,” she says, “my boyfriend’s a drummer.”

This teenage impetus to impress the girls and outdo your friends created the drive to improve. “Mostly it was learning off friends.” Says Keith “Someone would go to a lesson and go ‘I learned this’ and we’d be like ‘show us that’ - we’d be getting free lessons essentially.”

“I definitely think the competition of friends is a good thing because you’d see your friends do something and think that’s amazing. One of our friends could play Stairway to Heaven from start to finish, the solo and everything.”

“I really wanted to be good” says Sorcha “but I think the reason I’m still making music is because I have a good ear. I hated practicing the piano so I’d learn everything by ear. I’d know in my head what it should sound like and I’d know which note would go just by feel, and that is definitely how you make music.”

“Most of my learning came from singing in choirs where I was always singing in harmonies. That’s how I first came to being in bands, by singing harmonies for other people.”

Despite Sorcha’s constant childhood songwriting she didn’t put herself forward as a songwriter until she was twenty. “I didn’t have the confidence in myself before that. I started writing with someone else first. It’s really only with Sleep Thieves I stepped forward. I was always writing before but I wasn’t forceful.”

“I find it a hell of a lot easier to write a guitar riff than to learn someone else's.” says Keith “I was at a wedding recently and there was so many people who know loads of songs, and I realised I never once in my whole life learned a song.”

“We always write as if there’s an audience there watching us at a gig.” Says Sorcha “When we walk into the room it’s like we’re walking onto the stage, we don’t phone it in. It doesn’t work if one of us is not feeling positive. Sometimes we’ll just go for a pint and come back.”

Sleep Thieves started with Sorcha and Wayne recording “quiet, quirky pop… in a whisper in bedrooms” on “toy keyboards and glockenspiel.” However, a chance conversation about biscuits on the internet would coax Sleep Thieves out of their bedrooms and onto the stage on a permanent basis.

Sorcha tweeted ‘We’re looking out the window of our rehearsal space, it might be pissing raining but I’ve brought chocolate biscuits’ one night during rehearsals drawing the response ‘I want to be in your band’.  The group replied ‘actually we’re looking for somebody’ but that guy didn’t get the gig, Sleep Thieves guitarist Keith did. Keith was lured into the conversation by a photograph of a “deadly looking synth book.”

“We were at that point where we wanted to do something different,” says Sorcha. ”We had all these ideas but we were stuck, we had a few gigs and we had to do these (old) songs. The first gig Keith did was supporting Jape. We love Richie so much, he’s always been a positive influence for the kind of things we wanted to do.”

“I actually hate the way everybody loves Richie, fuck Richie,” says Keith jokingly.

At this point Sleep Thieves decided the inclusion of Keith into the line-up was a good point to start afresh with new material. “We stopped and said 'hang on, this is a band, this is a new thing, this is something different'” says Sorcha. “Within nine months or so we were able to do a whole new set without anything that Keith wasn’t involved in,” says Wayne. “The only thing that stayed on was the name.” adds Keith.

“Most of our first EP 'Islands' was written over one weekend in Wexford.” Says Warren. “Within six weeks of recording it we’d the CD's in our hands and got on a plane to London, did two shows there, then the Great Escape in Brighton and came back to Dublin for the Camden Crawl in Whelan’s,” Sorcha adds. “That was us basically saying ‘This is what we’re doing, this is what we sound like.’ It was all about atmosphere, creating a new world from the stage that you’re inviting everybody who’s watching to come in to.”

“As you get older you have more confidence. The world is such a big place, you go to other countries and people say I love your band - some journalist in your own country may not like it, but you go to a gig and it’s full and you think everyone else is into this. We just want to make the best music we can and not be influenced by other people’s opinions.”

“We don’t actually care if nobody listens to the music. So fucking what?” says Keith. “We enjoy making it,” says Sorcha, “that’s not to say that we don’t edit ourselves. We do, we constantly cut away stuff when we’re working on things. We have a process and if we’re not getting the feeling that this is the world we want to create then we don’t continue with it.”

“It’s the development side of things,” says Keith “we’re getting better at everything, every time we do something it’s getting better and better.”

“It was pretty quick.” Says Sorcha referring to the recording of their debut album ‘You Want the Night’, “but there was a time in between where we kind of lost faith a little bit.”

“I think it was a lack of confidence in ourselves,” says Keith. “We tried recording with some people and tried some things out. Things were coming back and we were thinking that’s not what we wanna sound like.”

“Sometimes when you’re working with somebody else, there’s that wanting everything to sound perfect, whereas we wanted to sound live...real. We wanted to sound more like the demo because that was the sound.”

“We had a lot of the songs ready and then Sparks came and we just wanted to record it real quick,” says Sorcha. “We had that out within a month. It was amazing hearing it back for the first time. I loved it, especially when we got the vinyl. In our heads we always wanted to do vinyl and that was the best thing to come out of having a record label.”

“It was exactly what we wanted it to sound like,” adds Sorcha. “We wanted the emotion that you feel when you write something in a room, where it’s coming from something really personal. Even though the lyrics might be obscure, there is something innately personal about three people pouring their hearts into something. You’re not doing it to make a quick buck, you’re doing it because it’s inside of you.”

“I said to Wayne ‘the mood is there’ and he played it on his phone and ran along beside me. That is how the album felt. Electronic music can be so perfect, robotic and everything in time. We wanted it to feel really live and fresh and atmospheric.”

Sleep Thieves are currently hard at work on their next album but will be taking time out from writing and recording to take part in the 35th annual CMJ festival in New York this October as part of a contingent of Irish acts chosen by Culture Ireland and Music From Ireland.