Glasgow-based band Vasa are looking forward to playing at Strange Behaviours festival this week at The Tolbooth, Stirling.

Blaine Thompson (guitar), Scott Coupar (guitar), John Niblock (bass) and Niall Morison MacRae (drums) are also on track to record their first full-length album early next year.

The instrumental post-rock quartet formed in 2011; since then they have released a debut EP at the end of 2012 titled Never Have Dreams, which was described by critics as “a masterpiece of elegance and sovereignty” and “one of the finest debuts in the post-rock genre in quite some time”.

Ahead of their 30-minute set in Stirling, bassist John spoke to the Advertiser.

How would you define your music?

-We’d probably define our music as instrumental rock. We do get billed as post-rock or math-rock, but the new music that we’ve been writing is more riff based than before, when previously we were based in more post-rock sensibilities, so I’d say instrumental rock suits us pretty well at the moment. Unless you want to call us smash rock.

You sound pretty similar to bands like Cynic (USA), minus the vocals, what are your influences and favourite bands?

-You have no idea how happy that comparison to Cynic makes me. I love that band. We’ve got quite a broad scope of influences as everyone in the band has quite differing music tastes so our scale of influence comes from far and wide. I’ll try to include bands we all agree are amazing, Cleft, Adebisi Shank, Alpha Male Tea Party, Sigur Ros and a load more I can’t think of at the moment.

Where does the name “Vasa” come from? Who came up with it?

-The band name comes from a 17th Century Swedish warship that sank about half an hour into it’s maiden voyage. Good omen for the band. Our guitarist Scott stumbled across it. It was actually a random Wikipedia article search as we were having severe trouble thinking of a decent band name and Vasa sounded good to us. Plus we couldn’t twist it into a filthy joke, which is always a good thing when naming a band.

You are soon about to go into the studio and record your first full-length album. Can you tell anything about it, are all the songs written?

-We’re hoping to go and record the album early February next year. We’re almost done writing and we will be playing a few of the tracks that are going on the album when we play Stirling this week.

Are you looking forwards to the gig in Stirling this week? Have you played at the Tolbooth before? Would you expect a good crowd?

-We really are. It’s been a while since our last gig and we have never played Stirling before. We’ll probably just stick to our usual 30 minute set just so we don’t eat into the other bands set time. We’ve never played the venue before but we reckon the crowd will be great as our good pal Kenny Bates has booked the whole thing and every time we have played a gig for him it’s been a great time with a great turnout. He actually gave us our first ever gig so we love Kenny loads just for that.

Quickfire questions with John from Vasa Favourite book: The Curios Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime Favourite colour: Blue Favourite band: Intronaut Favourite season: Winter. It’s the only season I don’t get sunburn Favourite drink: Irn-Bru Favourite TV show: The Walking Dead Day or night: Night Tea of coffee: Neither Relaxing or adventure holiday: Adventure Pub or club: Pub