THE Punishment Of Luxury Tour brings OMD, or Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark in old money, to York Barbican on Saturday night.

The sold-out 8pm gig forms part of an 18-date autumn tour to back up the September release of OMD's 13th studio album of a career stretching back almost 40 years to when two teenage Kraftwerk fans from the Wirral, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys, formed their synth-pop duo.

Such OMD albums as 1980's Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, 1981's Architecture And Morality and 1983's Dazzle Ships helped to shape the dominant electronic sound of that decade, alongside The Human League and Tubeway Army's Gary Numan.

Now McCluskey and Humphreys return with The Punishment Of Luxury, their first studio set since 2013's English Electric, creating a "daring collection of stylish synth pop and masterful song craft that sees OMD edge out of their comfort zone without compromising their integrity".

“It’s almost like we’ve gone back to being teenagers after all these years,” says McCluskey, now 58. “We just do whatever we want and there’s no record company to tell us what we can or can’t do.”

Reflective and sanguine in mood, the album was recorded in McCluskey and Humphreys' respective studios in Merseyside and London, with the final mixes being handled by both at Paul’s place.

Their 13th album is "lucky 13," says McCluskey. "We've taken great care and considerable time to make it a good album, and we're really happy with it.The great thing is that we're back in the place where we were in our very early days in that we're doing it for ourselves. But having said that, you have to be careful not to be self-delusional!

"We're in a good place now, with people praising us, but we don't want to do pale pastiches of what we've done before. By giving yourself time, you can self-edit, and our ethos is to still challenge ourselves, and there's so much on the album that's not the usual 'pop fodder'."

The Punishment Of Luxury is a progression "both electronically and in terms of themes on the record," says McCluskey. "I have a collection of notes of what I want to write about but I never write the lyrics first. We always write the music first, then the lyrics, and for this album, for example, some of the tracks have much more crunchy, dirty drums than we've used before.

"Some songs are more sparse than before, using the 'glitch' sound that we've previously discarded: the noises that are normally rejected."

Now OMD can make such choices where once they were limited by the ultimate limitations. "When we first began, not only did we not know how to play our instruments, but we didn't actually have any instruments, so it was a voyage of discovery. My left-handed guitar cost £32; it was the cheapest in the shop, and though I'm right-handed, I bought it, and I still play it upside down," says McCluskey.

"The Selmer Pianotron, of which I've only ever seen one, we had a friend who sold it to us for £25, and that's the famous plinky-plonky sound you hear on Electricity.

"Then, after six gigs, we got fed up with borrowing synths, so we bought a micro preset from my mother's mail order catalogue for £7 and 76 pence per week for 36 weeks and that was basically the sound of the first album!"

Roll forward all these years and McCluskey says: "We're blessed to still be able to play concerts, sell lots of tickets and still make interesting records, working hard and being determined that we won't be a grey version of our former selves.

"We started with a fairly radical idea, playing songs on a naive collection of instruments, and it turned out to be a hobby that got out of hand with a crazy name [Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark] that we chose when we were only going to do one gig!"

OMD play York Barbican, Saturday, November 18, 8pm; sold out.