Shihad have endured. They’re survivors – from the earliest days of metal mayhem in Wellington, New Zealand to now calling Melbourne home, they’ve been there, they’ve done that. Hell, they even changed their name (for a few years) while trying to ‘crack’ America. Through it all, they’ve released a clutch of mighty fine albums. Their newest Beautiful Machine is seemingly certain to propel them to even greater levels of acclaim, from New Zealand (where it’s already debuted atop the charts) to the rest of world.

“We’re so happy with it,” enthuses frontman Jon Toogood. “It went to number one straight away, which we’re stoked with. We were quietly confident we’d get to number one, then we heard it was up against Flight of the Conchords, and they’re a phenomenon. And they’re also Wellington crew, so we were so stoked to actually beat them. I’d say they’re the biggest thing in New Zealand entertainment in ages – no one else has won a Grammy!”

Beautiful Machine is quite a different release for the group – where Love is the New Hate followed on from the ‘Pacifier experiment’ (where the band changed their name for American record label acceptance) with a set of hard-edged tunes, this is very different indeed. For a start, it finds the band experimenting – much as they did with on their self-titled album and its anthem Home Again – with pop ideas. They even utilise a string section on Waiting Round For God.

“That was Phil,” Jon says. “He took that song away while we were recording and said ‘I’ve got some ideas’. He came back two days later and said ‘have a listen’…I just said ‘you’re a fucking genius!’ Usually I equate strings in a rock band with Metallica, but I thought it was so tastefully done that it was just right. It was also notes I wouldn’t even have considered – he followed what the words were saying, and the drama of that.”

Ah, the words. The words, the words, the words. Where Beautiful Machine really stands out is in what Toogood is singing. On songs like the aforementioned Waiting Round For God, The Bible and the Gun and The Prophet he is definitely questioning the value or organised religion like never before, examining the thoughts and motivations of what makes believers tick.

“What happened,” he explains, “is we spent a lot of time in America. I think, personally, that I always took it as a given in my formative teenage years…I thought there was more than just the human stories of who we are and where we come from, because the major religions didn’t sum it up for me. But it didn’t encroach on my space. For me, that was fine. Around the millennium there was a certain religious fight-back.”

Well, you can almost pinpoint the date of it beginning. September 11, 2001. It’s a time that’s affected the whole world in big ways, but also individuals in personal ways – from survivors to relatives who lost friends and family, from young men and women sent to fight in wars, to a little band from New Zealand who changed their name to sound less like ‘jihad’.

“We had to think about it a lot, and we were in the heart of a country that was very religious,” he shrugs. “It makes me think: my friends and I are in the minority now, and I always thought that sensible people could see the bullshit. I really want to like Richard Dawkins, but he’s a dick. You need someone with the charisma of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton to sell [the ideas of atheism] but he can’t do it.

“The song Beautiful Machine was written as I watched the footage from the Voyager II satellite that showed the planets on our solar system close up. It was humbling, and really exciting. And it also proves to me that it’s bigger than human stories, it’s bigger than that – it didn’t make me feel that this is a pointless existence, but that it’s AMAZING that we get 60 or 70 years (if we’re lucky) on this little blue dot that’s got this atmosphere that we can breathe. There’s too many people waiting around for the next life and missing this one entirely.”

So, Carpe diem then. Perhaps that explains why Beautiful Machine is such a relentlessly enthusiastic record, with songs like Rule the World and Chameleon displaying a sense of positivity that was perhaps missing in Love is the New Hate.

“The set up to the positivity on this record is all because we made Love is the New Hate,” Jon reckons. “It was totally cathartic and about getting that poison out of your system. You’d play those songs live and you’d feel purged every night. So for this album let’s make music that’s going to lift our spirits – I like anthemic songs, and One Will Hear The Other gets my spine tingling every time we play it. Doing an album like Love is the New Hate proved to me we can talk about the negative stuff, but this is about talking about the positive shit of being a human as well.”

Shihad’s Beautiful Machine is out now. The band is touring nationally in June, presented by FasterLouder.

Friday 13th June – Bar 388, Brisbane
Saturday 14th June – Hi-Fi Bar & Ballroom, Melbourne
Friday 20th June – The Gaelic Theatre, Sydney
Saturday 21st June – Live on Light Square, Adelaide