NOAH And The Whale have changed tack with each album more dramatically than any band since Dexys Midnight Runners. However, the switch from London nu-folk darlings to pastoral Nick Drake introspection and onwards last year to classic American song-craft is a natural evolution, rather than cynical chancing, insists front-man Charlie Fink.

“It’s very much instinctive. I’ve always tried to write with my guts, with what feels right. That’s it; the only way to do it,” says Charlie, who leads his band through songs from 2008’s Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down, 2009’s The First Days Of Spring and 2011’s The Last Night On Earth at a sold-out York Barbican tomorrow night.

“I’ve always found it impossible to put something out I don’t believe in; I’ve always avoided anything that feels contrived,” he adds.

Nevertheless, last year’s album, one of the Top 30 biggest-selling records of 2011 in Britain, marked one departure from past practice. Charlie was open to more shared influences than previously.

“It’s more to the taste of the other members,” he says. “Before that, I would come in with the song and the arrangement for the song.”

Why the change? “It’s partly that you spend so much time with each other that you get to hear a lot of everyone else’s musical tastes.”

The resulting record marked Charlie’s gradual resurgence after writing The First Days Of Spring on the rebound from his dumping by folk songstress Laura Marling, as strings made way for synthesisers, Vignotte-creamy choruses and the American soft-rock of the early 1980s.

You might even dare to call it AOR, but Charlie prefers to look beyond the confines of adult-orientated rock to the modern American songbook.

“I remember that term AOR!” he says, aware of its negative connotations. “It was funny because the blend I was trying to get – the song-writing influence – was more drawn from the classic American songwriters: Lou Reed, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, and also in terms of narrative, Tom Waits, as I was writing characters into the songs and I don’t think anyone does characters better than Tom Waits.”

When the band started demo-ing the tracks, they “sounded Seventies”, chiming with Charlie’s wish to write “big songs with choruses that people can sing along to”.

By way of contrast, The First Days Of Spring was expressly not written as a commercial album.

“You can’t aim to please people: you have to be true to yourself,” he says. “Hopefully it was an honest account of the experience of breaking up, but there also needs to be light at the end of the tunnel, which is why that record feels happier towards the end.”

While The Last Night Of Earth has broadened Charlie’s perspective from the personal, he recalled a comment by Tom Waits.

“He says the key to writing a song is not to eclipse yourself from a song, so you can filter yourself through the character you write about – and I think it’s impossible to give something of yourself even if you’re writing behind a character,” he says.

“For me, this album was lyrically a step forward, as it was writing in a way I wasn’t familiar with. I like to think I did okay when it’s very easy to get it wrong and harder to get it right.”

While some may fear for the future of the album as a format in an age of short attention spans and instant buzzes, Charlie remains a “big advocate” of the long player. “I still believe that the whole is greater than the parts,” he says. “The choice of the first single is not something that I think about at the start,” he says. “You have to first fulfil the overall vision.”

That said, the knockout chorus thrills him. He remembers hearing Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire during the writing sessions for the album and thinking “it would be great to have a song that elicits that moment”.

“That’s what it comes down, having that moment, and a great song is one that make you want to turn up the volume,” he says.

Such songs as L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. and Tonight’s The Kind Of Heart have had that effect, just like Noah And The Whale’s very first hit: 5 Years Time, the one with the ukulele and the whistling (and Charlie’s ex, Laura, on backing vocals).

And no, he has not wearied of that impossibly jaunty crowd favourite, even as its fifth anniversary approaches (and the song’s prophesy that love might not last has proved true).

“There’s no way anyone who’s not stone-hearted wouldn’t enjoy playing that song live,” says Charlie. “There’s a certain buzz you get seeing the whole room singing along.”

As restless as ever, Charlie and his band have started writing songs for their next album already, but work is in the early stages. “It feels really good,” he says of the progress so far.

It is too early to predict when a record might emerge, however. “You can’t really plan these things. I always feel it’s funny when a band says ‘We’re going to take two years to make the next album’.

“I think it was [playwright] Jez Butterworth who said, ‘When you stand naked in the rain, you’re not necessarily going to catch a cold’. So I’ll hold my metal rod in the air and see what it conducts.”

• Noah And The Whale play York Barbican tomorrow, supported by Emmy The Great; doors open at 7pm. SOLD OUT