Check out the Happier version of Fickle Friends at Golden Touch Festival in The Wedgewood Rooms

Fortunately the Brighton-based act had the tunes and the live show to match the hype and their debut album You Are Someone Else hit the top 10.

However, they struggled to follow up its success, and after touring their none-more-aptly titled second album Are We Gonna Be Alright? decided to take time out for the sake of their collective mental health.

"We kind of took a bit of a natural break,” says frontwoman Natti Shiner. “Being a band and touring is an amazing thing, but off the back of doing so much – basically an album's worth of music during lockdown, and then doing the album after lockdown, we were all sort of suffering somewhat.

“I think there's strength in knowing when you need to take a break for a little bit. That's not like a weakness or giving up, but I think all of us, definitely myself, I was struggling mentally to keep being creative and keep showing up.

“So we decided that after we toured that record that we would just take some time and pursue other things and do our own thing for a bit."

As Natti puts it: “Covid completely ruined us, along with various other things that happened. We weren't the only band or artists in that boat, so many of us were, but we had to go and get ourselves back into the room a little bit.”

They reconvened last September, and as Natti explains: “We were really, really hungry to be writing more music together, and get it going again on our terms.

“We've always been having to live off deals or record labels or had different management telling us what to do, and we're actually quite self-sufficient, I mean very self-sufficient! We write everything, produce everything, do all the artwork, do everything.

“So we're like, we don't need anyone else – let's do it our way.”

The four-piece hadn’t put a timeframe on this break, so when they reconvened it felt entirely natural.

"It wasn't like we stopped speaking to each other – Jack (Wilson – keys, guitars, programming) and I who do most of the writing in the band anyway, we were already writing with other people and we produce and write for other people, so we're still working together quite a lot.”

When asked if there was a particular moment where they decided to get back together, Natti can’t put her finger on any one thing.

“It wasn't very planned. It was no pressure – let's just get into the studio and start writing and see what happens. There was no: ‘We're going to do an album’, or do this, or whatever.

“We were just writing crap for literally six months with no plan. And then we actually sat down and were like: ‘Okay, well, if we're going do this, are we doing a third album?’

“Yes, let's do it. Let's start writing for it. Let's get new management. Let's build a whole new team. Let's do it on our terms.

“The fresh blood from the team around us… everyone is involved because they loved it, rather than lets make money and do this, and do that!”

That was last September, and since then they have released a string of singles, including the most recent, Happier. A song about accepting yourself for who you are, it could almost be a manifesto for this phase of Fickle Friends.

“It's the story of when we were wallowing in all of the negatives,” says Natti, “I can't pay my rent, my life sucks, my career is complete joke – this is when we're taking time off because it felt like we'd lost everything.

"And then when we came back to start this new era of the band, a lot of us had done a lot of therapy. We've come back to it and being like: it doesn't matter what you're doing, who you are, what you have in your life, if you wake up every single day and you're like: ‘I am happier than I've ever been’, then that's the energy that you'll just carry with you.

“You don't have to be top of the world to be happy. That's what the song is about, and what our whole mindset is now.”

The new album is tentatively pencilled in for November, but long before that, tomorrow (Friday, June 14), the band are headlining the first night of Golden Touch at The Wedgewood Rooms in Southsea. The festival dedicated to new and up-coming music is taking place over two days for the first time this year.

Then after that they’re playing a run of shows under the Revive Live banner with the Music Venues Trust (MVT).

“We've always been patrons of the MVT. If fits our perception of how made the band, how we gained our fans – playing all of those grassroots venues, going on tours in our Ford Galaxy with our roof box full of our keyboard stands and stuff.

“We have our entire career to thank for those venues and those tours so it would be such a shame to lose them.

“I think it's an amazing thing that MVT are doing where they bring slightly bigger bands to come and play in these places that never quite get a look in. We've never played in Sunderland, we've never played in Doncaster so we get to go this and get to see what's out there.

"It's a little bit scary because I don't know who's going to want to see Fickle Friends in Doncaster but being able to give back in that way is really important to us.”

What’s the reception been like since they’ve returned to the public eye?

"The general feedback has been really really nice, beautiful to be honest. We just didn't know what we were coming back to, so we tentatively put on like a little warm-up show in Camden and honestly, I was like will people come are they going to buy tickets?

“We put the tickets on sale and they sold out in five minutes, so there's definitely people still there. It's a good sign. I think I got too tied up in: “Argh, we've got to make the song go viral!” But that's not who we are. We make something of quality and put on a good show and bring people together.”

Two years can be a long time in the music world. From being so wildly hyped before they’d even released an album, to making a low-key return now, how has it compared?

"I don't think you can compare it because we've come back to a landscape that's so different,” says Natty. “When we finished up album two, TikTok was in the embryonic stages of it taking over the world, so we weren't really having to do any of that.

“The way that we've built fans from the beginning is from playing live, it's from touring and doing things the old-school way. We've been around for a while so the way that we do music and present ourselves is very different to how new artists are now.

“It's been quite a challenge for me to know how to position what we're doing and reach people because I'm like, how do you reach people unless you're on TikTok, or whatever?”

Golden Touch takes place at The Wedgewood Rooms on Friday, June 14 and Saturday, June 15.

Fickle Friends headline Friday, where they’re joined by The Covasettes, Keo, Tom A Smith, Pentire, The Mercians, Floretenes, Lock-In. Doors open 6pm. Tickets £20.

Weekend and Saturday tickets have already sold out.

Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk/events.