"Love is so much more powerful than hate. Hate is destruction and love is production." Lynval Golding.

The Specials are back with ten songs on a brand new album. Influential, important and exhilarating live, they are a band embedded in this country's DNA. It is impossible to envisage the musical landscape without them, from the startling, angular Gangsters in 1979 to their swan song, the epoch-making Ghost Town in 1981. They infused ska with punk, homegrown political anxiety with wider issues.

"There was never a long term plan," says Horace, the Special's extremely grounded, polite bassist. "Towards the end of 2015 Lynval, Brad and I got together in a little rehearsal room and we recorded some demos on a handheld mic," continues Horace. "Then of course Brad dies [in December 2015, of a heart attack]. It took a year or so to pick ourselves back up again."

But eventually they do, and they record. Ten songs – originals and some covers. Encore. And it's fucking great – acknowledging the last forty years, taking what the Specials did and moving it forward. "I'm aware our work has been out there for forty years and I'm so grateful for what we've done, I pinch myself sometimes," says Lynval. "I can pat myself on the back now, and say 'Well done,' because that what my father says to me. As a band, making this record, it was the closest we'd ever been."

"That's the thing with the Specials," says Horace. "We are three very different people, but you put us together and we become the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world, as far as I'm concerned. Something remarkable happens."