"Our music reflects our state of mind," says Nitzer Ebb's Bon Harris, "and this record is more introspective than our other albums. But there's still that edge of intensity there, because Nitzer Ebb are NEVER laid back!" "When we write a love song, it's aggresive and twisted," agrees Doug McCarthy. "That's Nitzer Ebb. If it sounds too straight it's wrong!"

Three years ago Nitzer Ebb's colossal Ebbhead album catapaulted the Essex duo into the Big league of electro-industrial noise mayhem merchants. It was a brooding, menacing, superbly addictive album of sledgehammer beats and disturbing lyrical insights. Nitzer Ebb had threatened to deliver their classic album for years; this was it.

Nitzer Ebb toured Ebbhead across the globe, from the Deep South redneck territory of the States to the wilds of Siberia, to adultation. Their time was now. With typical perversity, however, the Ebb didn't want to follow any routes mapped out for them by others. McCarthy and Harris returned to the UK to plan their next move, sat down to examine exactly what they wanted Nitzer Ebb to be and discovered they shared a nagging but profound dissatisfaction with the band's direction.

"I'd been getting bored of relying on nothing but programmed, inflexible computers, and I realised that Bon had as well," says Doug. "We decided to experiment with interpreting the Nitzer Ebb feel with real instruments."

So work began on the album which became Big Hit. Doug and Bon began writing songs in London, but it was a journey which was to take them to Chicago, Los Angeles and Nevada and incorporate changes in musicians, producers and, importantly, attitude.

The first songwriting sessions were tentative. Nitzer Ebb had spent years channelling their reserves of energy and frustration into computers and creating musical electro-explosions. Now they began to work with Doug playing guitar and Bon on bass.

"We hadn't sat and jammed for ten years but we found it gave us a lot more emotional input," says Bon. "Ebbhead was like piecing together fragments of a jigsaw puzzle. This was a lot more like a real band playing." Nitzer Ebb wanted to record Big Hit in America and after an aborted start in Chicago, settled down in Los Angeles with co-producers Al Clay and Flood.

"It was good to work with Flood because the way he treated guitars with technology on the U2 and Depeche Mode albums was the way we wanted to go," says Doug. "It showed you can get energy and weirdness without premeditated programming."

Al Clay left the project and Flood took a break to record Zooropa with U2. Meanwhile Nitzer Ebb searched for a new drummer, working with sticksmen including ex-Pixies man Dave Lovering before settling on L.A. local Jason Payne.

By now Doug and Bon realised that their rethink of musical perspective had paid off. The combination of guitar, bass AND computer technology was shaping an album which was exciting them more day by day. "We knew we were pushing back the boundaries of our sound, expanding the band's reach," says Bon. "The passion is still there but I'm proud of the musicality of this record."

"I was able to write about a wider range of emotions," agrees Doug. "Before we were all frustration and anger and violence, and it was all true, but now I can delve deeper, go into other emotional areas as well." The resulting album, Big Hit, sees Nitzer Ebb make a major leap forward. They've taken risks, in radically rethinking the band's whole ethos, and been rewarded. Big Hit contains plenty of the adrenalin-bursts and howls of frustration loved by Nitzer Ebb devotees, but this time around the band have varied their attack. There are new nuances and subtleties.

"There are lots of people like Trent Reznor trying to be the loudest, hardest man in the world, which is fair enough but it doesn't interest us now," says Doug. "I wrote a song on Big Hit called Boy about the pain and hurt I feel at being separated from my son, and I'd never have put that on a Nitzer Ebb album before!"

However, Big Hit contains more than enough trademark seismic detonations of Nitzer Ebb frustration and anger at modern living to satisfy hardcore fans. Cherry Blossom, the kicking opening track, is a brilliant outburst of fire which Doug unleashed around the time of the Gulf War hostilities.

"It seemed so clearcut that we had to fight the Iraqis because they were totally in the wrong," he says. "Then we leave the Kurds to die, and do nothing about Bosnia and it becomes clear it was an utterly cynical exercise to safeguard our oil. This cynicism is a perpetual thing, as inevitable as Cherry Blossom falling off the trees each year."

Similarly, In Decline was a song triggered by a visit Nitzer Ebb made to Russia two years ago.

"I remember seeing this old man, about 80 years old, sweeping the streets of St. Petersburg in full military uniform, " says Doug. "It was so sad and pathetic, and yet it's no different from the West where we have to wear this uniform of pretending to be an adult, just to keep people in their place." As ever, though, Big Hit deals more with the personal than global politics; most songs work off the energies and passions of damaged relationships.

Nitzer Ebb have never been a band to play it safe. They took their electro-rage as far as it could go, tired of its rigid limitations, and cast around for an alternative. Big Hit is a brilliant record, a vast, powerful, passionate return. It's proof of a major, significant band, on the rise, still growing.

"There are more emotions here, more honesty, less vagueness but the same intensity and frustrations and anger," says Doug. "If there wasn't passion, it wouldn't be a Nitzer Ebb record!"

It's been three years since your last fix of Nitzer Ebb.

It's time for the Big Hit.