When The Virginmarys look at the world, all they see is control. Uncaring governments controlling supressed masses. Drugs and alcohol controlling the bodies and minds of the vulnerable. Warmongers controlling the fates of entire nations. Record labels’ controlling naïve, trusting rock bands. It’s what fuels the vitality and vitriol of their second album, and it seems, to them, impossible not to address.

“All you need to do is take a look around you,” says outspoken drummer Danny Dolan. “Everything seems just so fucked up. It’s just a case ‘fuckin’ hell, how much more shit can we take before it gets better?’.” Yet so few acts tackle issues like these, right? “In the sixties, music groups weren’t divided into who’s political and who’s not, everyone was just singing about what was happening. Now when you turn on the radio, every song is about twerking, buying things or tipping a £5,000 bottle of champagne on a girl’s ass. It just makes me want to yell ‘Fuck Off!’”

“You don’t really feel you live in the same world as the lyrics on the radio,” adds singer, guitarist and lyricist Ally Dickaty. “We don’t want to be preachy, but it’s silly not to get people to start a dialogue about different issues. The heart-breaking thing is that though it’s this bad, people just go on day to day without really caring about it.”

The Virginmarys are old hands at soldiering on, but only because they care so deeply. Devoted Macclesfield lads – although Danny originally hails from Manchester and Ally moved there ten years ago from Helsby – they have carved a path to international acclaim with hard graft, hard knocks and hard talk.

“The album is directed at people at the top making big decisions, turning peoples lives into utter shit and scape-goating people that they shouldn’t,” Ally explains. “The whole concept is directed at people who can’t sympathize with what other people are going through in everyday life.”

Naturally for a band so ravenous of riff, they all started out as guitarists. When Ally first met Danny in 2000, aged 16, at Mid-Cheshire music college, Ally had just started writing songs inspired by his upbringing on the blues of BB King and early Fleetwood Mac and his teenage obsessions with Hendrix, Sabbath and “the attitude and aggression” of punk. Danny, meanwhile, had grown up in a house full of drumkits and, having been denied a guitar by his skins-loving dad, eventually got the beat-keeping bug.

“It was the worst course ever,” Danny says of their college experience. “I think during the second year we didn’t even do a full week, we just ended up skiving off and coming to my house. We would jam and bond over bands, that was all we wanted to do. I remember us just sitting in the canteen at school and saying to each other ‘why don’t we just be a guitar and drum band? We can just get in a caravan and drive around France and busk’. In a way, we’re still doing that.”

Their rock lives took a rather more glamorous twist, though, when they formed a band (“very different” from The Virginmarys), got signed and moved to LA to try to become international superstars. Although, after several years, fall-outs with their label and dodgy contracts eventually put paid to the first phase of their careers. “It was quite a clichéd story of how we got disillusioned with everything. We had to start our lives all over again. In a way it was horrible, but in another way we got used to the bullshit early on. We realized that being in a band isn’t really what you though it was as a kid. It’s a business and you got to look after yourself. You’ve got to market yourself in a way that shows you’re not gonna get dictated to and screwed over.”

Back in Macc, around Christmas 2009 they came across Matt Rose, another guitarist, in a pub and convinced him to take up the bass to join them in a new project, The Virginmarys. This time, however, they’d be firmly in control. For the coming years they toured the UK with a rabid ferocity, building a fanbase across the north of Britain and recording an EP every year to self-release. Gradually, word of their vivid punk greatness grew, and they found themselves touring the UK and Europe with the likes of New Model Army, Skunk Anansie and Slash.

“We did the Download festival in 2010 and then we got a four support shows with Slash, which was incredible,” Ally says. “Slash ended up being a big fan of ours. He put us on some compilation CDs that he would put on for Classic Rock and would wear our t-shirts while he was on stage.” “A lot of people thought it was photo shopped,” Matt laughs. “There are a lot of crossover aspects to our sound which makes it hard to market us,” Ally continues. “We don’t really fit into the mainstream, but seeing people like Slash and New Model Army being big fans of you shows you you’re doing something right, if they’re singing your praises.”

Following a well-received self-financed debut mini-album Cast The First Stone in 2010, and with industry and press support behi