One of them is called Captain Meat. They're partial to soaking tampons in vodka and sticking them up their bums. Locked in a studio in New England they've picked their brains with a brew called 'Mad Dog'. Meet Mogwai: the band who just don't care...

"Barry, play that chord! The paedophile chord!" Stuart Braithwaite, Mogwai's guitarist and alpha male, is suffering from a bad case of cabin fever. Recording their second album in the eerily quiet American town of Fredonia, he hasn't slept in two days. Recently, in a fit of mania, he decided to shave off all his hair. There's no escape - he can't even go for a walk. It's hunting season and he might get mistaken for a bear, albeit a bald one.

Legs akimbo, Barry Burns, Mogwai's newest member, plays the chord. "Ooh," cries Stuart, "that's nasty. It's got lots of horrible fifths in it. It's like a paedophile on the prowl."

He flips on his hood and starts stalking the room with an evil grimace as the band collapse in Buckfast-fuelled hysterics. And they were supposed to be out here to avoid any gibbonry...

'Post-Rock' is not a scene renowned for characters. Even if you love bands Me Tortoise or Labradford, their pathological dourness can become infuriating. What do these geeks think they're doing - retina surgery or music?

But out of this tepid milieu come Mogwai, defiant Liams to, the rest of the scene's Noels. Their debut album, 1997's 'Mogwai Young Team', hatched a fantastically futuristic vision of rock, where any hazardous muso-leanings were swept away by brutally melodious waves of sound. It showed once and for all that young bucks could offer more than just Ash-styled teen-punk.

Usually, their kind is consigned to the white label shelves of obscurist indle shops, but Mogwai have escalated into major players. They were Manic Street Preachers' seaside support last year and legendary producer Arthur Baker uses them as a backing band on his new album. At a time when indie-by-numbers acts like theaudience are struggling, the instrumental adventures of five Scottish early-twentysomethings suddenly sound wonderfully of-the-moment.

It helps that Mogwai didn't get personality transplants when they bought their flutes and FX pedals. They even have some most un-Tortoise-like nicknames. There's drummer Martin Bulloch, aka Bionic because of his pacemaker, who's comically obsessed with Def Leppard's one-armed drummer - "His first words after the accident when he lost his arm were, 'I'm a famous drummer, you must help me. 'What a prick."

Baby-faced guitarist John Cummings is nick- named Captain Meat due to his Homer-esque obsession with chops. Bassist Dominic Aitchison is called Demonic, because of his childhood terror of Lucifer, commemorated in their finest moment 'Mogwai Fear Satan'. Freshly recruited keyboardist Barry Burns is Hobbit because he quite likes the book. And there's Stuart Braithwaite, nick-named Plasmatron. Nobody can remember why.

They met up through friends of friends, united by a love of heavy metal, My Bloody Valentine and, most importantly, Celtic FC. Hailing from various desolate satellite towns around Glasgow, they were spurred on by the same kind of underground spirit that formed The Delgados and Belle & Sebastian, forging their own scene because there was nothing else around.

"Where I come from is just a stream of piss," sighs Stuart. "It's not quiet, though. It's insane, because the kids have nothing to do. They just sit there at nights throwing stones at the moon."

Mogwai are not long past stone-throwing age themselves, but their youth has unfortunate associations. "We used to get compared to bands like Symposium," glowers Martin, suddenly aggressive. "What the fuck do we have in common with them? I remember meeting them at Reading and thinking they were all right, then they played - I could hardly believe my fucking ears. It offended me how rubbish it was."

"We got offers from their record company," guffaws Stuart. "We were going to accept on the grounds that we'd get to tell them to their faces they were dropped. We'd happily pay their taxi fare to the dole office."

It was all the Relic's fault, of course. Mogwai's burgeoning reputation as "a post-rock Led Zeppelin nightmare" (Stuart's words) began on their first tour with former Teenage Fanclub member and notorious gibbon Brendan O'Hare on drums. O'Hare was known as The Relic for the heinous crime of being an ancient 27 years old. He was sacked shortly after the release of 'Mogwai Young Team', allegedly for not keeping quiet during an Arab Strap gig.

"Brendan, shall we say, opened our eyes to a few clings," says Dominic, refusing to be drawn any further. The band even began to generate their own Spinal Tap-style myths. One report suggested that in Prague, being too skint or mean to buy proper amounts of booze, the band soaked tampons in vodka and shoved them up their bums.

"Recording that album, there were a lot of sketches going on," says Dominic ('sketch' is band lingo for 'fight'). "it's too painful for me to listen to," groans Stuart. "All I can remember about it is sitting up at four in the morning thinking, 'What the fuck am I gonna do?'"

So now they're as far away from harm as possible, living residentially in a studio owned by their producer, Mercury Rev's Dave Fridmann. Here in the remotest part of New York State, 500 miles from New York City, there are only trees, deer and the odd road. There's so little to do that they've discovered the joys of badminton and web-surfing.

"We e-mailed the guy who does Bright Light [unofficial Mogwai web site] that the next album was a religious concept record," guffaws Stuart. "He didn't fall for it."

The truth is the new album sounds more restrained, a far more angular, complex affair than their often gratuitously noisy debut - and little wonder that the mood is so reflective. They can't even go down the local bar because John's still only 20. "You can get hold of Mad Dog [a fortified wine] for $3 a bottle, though," he says with all the excitement that under-age drinking brings.

A more worrying threat to health exists outside the safety of the studio - the omnipresent hunters. "We get woken up by gun- shots every morning," says a wide-eyed Barry. "The other day there was a 12-year-old boy shooting at our mailbox with a gun. It's riddled with holes."

"I was out shopping and I saw this red light, pin-pointed on my head," adds Martin, still shaken. "It was a viewfinder from a gun. The hunter came up and, said, 'Sorry son, I thought you were a deer'. Jesus Christ." The title of the album, not coincidentally, is 'Come On Die Young'.

The band are well used to more intentionally hostile, though less lethal, receptions. "When we supported the Manics, the audiences were just appalled," says Stuart, still incredulous at the sheer hatred. "They were just sheep, the kind of bastards that buy 'Shine' compilations, who hate anything they've not encountered before. I was like, 'We're doing this for you!' Most of the gigs ended up with us screaming, 'You've got no soul!"'

"To be honest, it was one of the best weeks of my life," grins Dominic. "It was always the same people in the front rows, and it became our mission to inflict as much pain on these wee bastards as we physically could."

"We must have fucked up their hearing," dead pans Martin with an unnerving look in his eye.

A couple of Mogwai fans were even assaulted as they told booing fans to shut up. This sort of confrontational gig is not usually associated with a self-consciously 'art-house' band, but Mogwai consider themselves more Stooges than Stereolab. Last year, they surprised a lot of people who'd pigeonholed them as boho doodlers when they came out against the government's plans to impose a nine o'clock curfew, entitling their last EP 'No Education = No Future (Fuck The Curfew)'

"I don't want to be too pretentious," says Stuart nervously, "but I do think that we are a political band. It's not about who you vote for. If you look at what we do and what Shed Seven do, it's obvious that we're not exactly conforming."

With their new album, Mogwai are drifting even further away from the traditional verse-chorus blueprint. "I've got this awful feeling that the kids aren't going to like this one," says Dominic, his smile implying he's not especially concerned. "It is a heavy duty dour-a-thon, and there's no noise on it. I think people liked 'Mogwai Young Team' because it was a disgustingly noisy album, but that loud-quiet thing was becoming a cliched."

"I'm pushing for a soul-funk direction,' laughs Barry. "Gay disco! That's what we want!"

Richey-Loving bigots, sister-screwing hunters, narrow-minded critics - all of these misguided souls leave Mogwai untouched. Their only heartfelt cause of concern is that they're never going to fulfil their biggest ambition - being cover stars of their beloved Kerrang! magazine.

"We can rock enough for them," explains Stuart, "but they won't do it because we don't have any words." So, what if Mogwai had to choose between seeing Black Sabbath or Tortoise? There's a pause, almost as long as one of Mogwai's more epic tracks, as Stuart rubs his stubbly head anxiously.

"It's got to be Sabbath," he decides eventually. "With Tortoise there are lulls in the middle, when they get the samba going and they turn into Santana. I mean, it's still good, but it's not 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, is it?"