In the country last week for sold out shows in Sydney and Melbourne, UK indie-pop act Alt-J will return for next year’s Laneway Festival.

Vocalist/ guitarist Joe Newman says the band's sound is quite relevant at the moment, mixing a variety of styles and genres.

“I would say it’s a mixture between folk, electronica, hip hop beats, then that’s kind of shadowed by indie-pop maybe, so all that put together.”

Joe says the band didn’t want to jump in at the deep end the first time on our shores, so they decided to play only two shows.

“We didn't want to bite off more than we could chew, and I think we just wanted to give people a taste of the live performance as opposed to playing loads and loads of shows and playing to no one.”

Their live performance is all about working toward getting the sound of the album right without cheating.

“We don't have any backing tracks or sequences that the audiences can't see but can hear,” Joe says, “so it's a real kind of old-school show in the sense that everything we play you can hear. We like to keep it kind of like that.”

After working on their 2012 debut album, 'An Amazing Wave', for five years, Joe is thrilled with the positive reception.

“We are extremely proud of the album. The reaction we’ve got has been pretty phenomenal; I think a lot of people are beginning to cherish the album in a weird way, we're selling out shows and filling venues and that's off the back of the album.”

The quartet formed after meeting at Leeds University while studying Fine Arts and English Literature. 

“We were forced to meet really, and we discovered we had a lot in common. We all had the same sense of humour and then we started hanging out and realised we all played instruments.

“We were originally doing it because we wanted to do something a bit different, and we realised we were doing something that was kind of good so we kept it up and started taking it more seriously.”

Alt-J play Laneway Festival at RNA Showgrounds Friday February 1.