The Wedgewood Rooms has a decent-sized stage for a venue of its capacity, and tonight that’s accentuated by Enochian Theory’s instruments and equipment being pushed as close to the back and side edges as possible. There’s a lot of wide open space up there for four guys to fill, with no props, no pyros, no dancers, no tricks. It’s a bold move by a band with no shortage of ambition – an ambition that has seen them set up their own record label and PR to fund and support their own band’s activities.

TDP: You’re not really pitching for the commercial end of the market, are you?

Ben [vox, guitar]: “What, by playing prog rock?” [laughs]

TDP: How much of a factor was that in your decision to go independent?

Sean [bass]: “You mean starting the label and that? It was more that we’d seen we could do it… and we weren’t really into the whole thing of sending off your album in the hope of getting signed. I mean getting signed is what most bands dream of, but the reality of it - as we learned - isn’t quite what it’s made out to be. ”

Ben: “That’s the thing, that fierce independence. We know we’re never going to be on Top of the fucking Pops or anything… ”

Sam [drums]: “That having been said, though, there is a massive market.”

Ben: “Right – there’s bands playing progressive that are rocking people’s socks off, playing the same sort of music as us and totally packing out venues. They haven’t leapt to instant success… I mean, Tool and Opeth, for a start. They’ve both been going close to twenty years, and they’re finally getting to that level of recognition. Of course, I wouldn’t mind getting there a little bit quicker than that… ” [laughs]

It’s still early days for Enochian Theory. This is their first show for over half a year - played in their home town - and it’s mostly a friends and die-hard fans affair, nowhere even close to a sell-out. But once they’re past some initial new-equipment nerves, the music they’re playing makes the audience size irrelevant. It’s huge.

Ben: “I’d never played keyboards in my life but I wanted keyboards in Monument to the Death of an Idea, so I just bought one and started learning how to play the thing. I don’t know about the rest of the guys, but when we first started playing… I think you’ve always got to have goals and targets, a vision. My personal vision for Enochian Theory was that I wanted it to be as epic as possible, to incorporate all of our influences and just really push it on, y’know?

“I mean, it’s blatantly obvious and I kind of hate to mention it, but Devin Townsend is a huge influence, I love the guy’s work. I want to have every piece of the frequency spectrum filled in with some noise or sound. It didn’t really work on the last record, because we’re still finding our feet. But in the new stuff there’s more melody, more time changes and tempo shifts, and I think it’s going to be a massive step up.”

The keyboard from the previous material has been replaced with a laptop, which - once cajoled into submission after a balky start - produces a wide landscape of sound to bolster Enochian Theory’s moody progressive attack. Atmospheric effects and thunderstorms, synths and strings and strange mechanical glitches… all orchestrated behind two shredding guitars and a rock-solid rhythm section pushing out polyrhythms and time-changes aplenty. Once they get up a head of steam, you’d not think they were playing to scarcely a hundred people. Perhaps that’s because they don’t care.

TDP: Worst case scenario – say Enochian Theory doesn’t work out the way you want it to. How do you know when to stop?

Sean: “When it stops being fun!”

Ben: “That’s when it’s time to give up. We’ve discussed this many times, and we’re happy to play to two disinterested people and a dog, y’know? And if we can get one of them to turn around at the end of the night and say “I’ve never heard anything like that before in my life, but it was brilliant,” then we’ve achieved a goal. I mean, I hate the tedium of touring, but what made the whole last tour for me was this one guy at the last show, this one teenaged guy who came up to me and said “that was the most amazing thing I ever heard, can I get a CD?” So as long as there’s still a few people who are interested, as long as it’s still fun, we’ll keep doing it.”

Having watched Enochian Theory develop over the last four years, the music I’m hearing tonight is both impressive and in some ways inevitable. This is the sound they’ve been reaching for since the start: thick, smoky and intricate, sprawling out like a Central American city, seeping into the cracks and niches of the room.

At the two ends of the spectrum, full-on metal bludgeon plays off against an almost folky Euro-prog vibe; in between are swathes of delay-soaked tapping, Hayes’s soaring melancholic vocals, curiously off-key riffs that loop and mutate and burrow back into themselves and much more. It’s a technique of light and shade; this new material is a butterfly to the caterpillar of their previous work.

Ben: “The plan was to write and record and not do any shows at all this year, to just work on the album. But the pressure of having the deadline of this show to work towards has really forced us to get it on, y’know. We’ve got a full album’s worth of songs, fifty-five minutes, seven tracks … but we set cut-off dates where we’d stop writing and start practising.”

TDP: Do you think this long period will lose you a certain amount of momentum in the public eye?

Ben: “Oh yeah.”

Sean: “We were planning to tour Europe this year, but the finances didn’t quite work out for that. So we weren’t originally planning to write a new album, but the way things happened it sort of put the idea into our minds.”

Sam: “We had to make an album. It would have been to much to try to write and do tours as well.”

Sean: “I mean, we’d only scratched the surface with touring before. We’re treating last year as like a practice run, but now we know what we’re trying to do a little bit better. We know we can’t do headline tours, for example, but equally we know we can’t play alongside local bands, because neither situation draws enough people for the effort expended. It all just needs to happen on a slightly larger scale from now on.”

That tonight is a first ‘dress rehearsal’ run of the new material is plain from the slight hardware stumble from the computer running the backing tracks at the start of the set, and in Hayes’s repeated apologies for mistakes that we’re not familiar enough with the material to have noticed. And it’s this stagecraft that needs to be polished by long weeks touring in front of unfamiliar crowds as much as the music, if not more so. But Enochian Theory are wise to the learning curve.

Ben: “Everything we’ve done has been trial and error, really. It’s not as if someone gave us a big book of rules that said “follow from A to B, then to C”… We made mistakes, spent more money on some things than we should have done. But what’s life about, at the end of the day?”

TDP: If you could go back four years to when you first started the band and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Sam: “We’d write that book with the “A to B” instructions and say “here you are, lads, off you go”… ”

Sean: “I don’t think we’ve done anything wrong, actually. I don’t think we’d have gotten to where we are if we hadn’t had the problems and made the mistakes that we made.”

Ben: “It’s human nature to learn from your mistakes… ”

Sean: “Some of our mistakes have been the best things we’ve done.”

The question is: how many other bands across the UK – across the world – are thinking the same way? How many of them are watching the big labels collapse like an overcooked soufflé while the Radioheads and Trent Reznors of the world cut bold new paths with the tools of the time? The simple answer is “loads of them”, and very few of them will succeed.

Whether Enochian Theory’s strong musical offering and relentless work ethic will make them one of those success stories is something only time will tell us. But whatever you may think of their music, they’re pioneers in the true sense of the term – risking it all for the dream of independence