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These are also the first songs Elbow have come up with since Guy Garvey (pictured) married his actress girlfriend Rachael Stirling

There is something reassuringly down to earth about Elbow. 

The Manchester group has won the best British band award at the BRITs and can pack out an arena, but one of their great strengths is their cheery warmth.

Even when they chose to set a batch of songs in New York City, as they did three years ago, they still sang heartily of the need for ‘G&T and sympathy’.

Given their unassuming charm, it’s no surprise that a good Elbow song, like a good pub yarn, usually takes the scenic route towards its crowning moment. The group’s biggest single, One Day Like This, kept listeners waiting three minutes and 20 seconds before its rousing, Hey Jude-like chorus — and Little Fictions displays a similar disregard for pop convention.

The album, Elbow’s seventh, was set in motion on the back of some boozy recording sessions in a rented house in Scotland before the band moved on to singer Guy Garvey’s attic in Prestwich.

Its hooks and nuances reveal their excellence gradually, repaying those prepared to give the ten songs here a little time.

So far, so Elbow. But Little Fictions signals a change, too. Following the departure of drummer Richard Jupp, who had been playing with the group for two decades, it is their first record as a four-piece rather than a quintet, and the resulting refinements — drum loops, a greater reliance on dance beats — are refreshing.

These are also the first songs Elbow have come up with since Garvey, 42, married his actress girlfriend Rachael Stirling, the daughter of Diana Rigg, last summer, and the general gist is upbeat. Lyrics were written on the couple’s honeymoon in Sardinia — and it shows.

Elbow perform during the Graham Norton Show, which will air on BBC One tonight

An adventurous tone extends to the instrumentation. 

Elbow have worked with Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra before, but the ensemble’s contributions this time are part of a patchwork that includes a local community choir and the stunning vocal troupe London Contemporary Voices. 

With Elbow keyboardist Craig Potter producing, there is also a move away from strummed acoustics to electric sounds, placing Potter’s brother, guitarist Mark, front and centre.

With the latter’s nagging guitar accompanied by the swirling strings of the Hallé, opening number Magnificent (She Says) outlines the album’s scope, its picturesque tale of a girl playing with glassy pebbles on a sun-kissed Italian beach building to an anthemic chorus.

The drummer-less band’s rhythmic experiments begin on the following track, Gentle Storm. Elbow have compared its percussive loops to the loose, funky sound of Washington go-go music, but there’s still something very British in its hypnotic, silky grooves. Later on, Kindling is accompanied by the sound of logs being dropped onto a floor.

Some numbers never really get going. Inspired by a trip to India, K2 is punctuated by the fluent fretwork of bassist Pete Turner, but it still shuffles too close to prog-rock indulgence.

Against that, there are gripping echoes of Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground on All Disco, with Mark Potter’s chiming guitar prefacing the album’s most memorable chorus. Various instruments drift in and out of the beats-driven, but mellow, Trust The Sun, a dance number for the morning after rather than the night before.

And, in keeping with Elbow’s disdain for the old ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus’ adage, the title track is the longest song they have yet recorded. Lasting eight minutes, it builds slowly but gloriously to the conclusion that ‘love is the original miracle’. We shouldn’t be deceived by Elbow’s blokeish, everyday facade: their best music is far from ordinary.

Little Fictions is out today on CD, vinyl and download. Elbow begin a UK tour at the O2 Academy, Birmingham, on March 1.