Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. This is a story of heartbreak, of depression, black, black humour and euphoric escape. It's a story about The Delgados and how they came to make one of the greatest albums of this, or any other, year.

Our story begins, as all good stories should, with our main characters, The Delgados - Alun Woodward (guitar/vocals), Emma Pollock (guitar vocals), Stewart Henderson (bass) and Paul Savage (drums). It's early 2001 and the band are nervous. Behind them is eight years of ambition, friendship, argument and musical experiment. They started a record label, Chemikal Underground, that gave a leg-up to such much loved Scottish bands as Mogwai and Arab Strap (they still run it actually, but that, as they say, is another story). They also made three albums of beautifully skewed'n'dreamy folk-pop, culminating in April 2000 and The Great Eastern - an album of scope, splendour, sadness and beauty that you all already own, right? But where next? Well…how about London's Barbican Arts Centre. It's March 2001 and notorious outsider artist Joe Coleman is about to show a film of his paintings – a nightmare world of serial killers, side-show freaks, blood, sperm and violence. The Delgados will provide the live soundtrack. It's the first time that the band have written collaboratively, as a four piece, without Alun and Emma's lyrics, relying on the power of the music alone to move the audience. "Up until then we'd made melodic, sweet music," says Paul, "and suddenly we were working on this. This was hardcore." "It showed us how music could be powerful without a melody," explains Emma Pollock, "that it could move you with the same intensity. As soon as you do that you're gonna come up with some of the best music you'll ever write."

It was one of the most profoundly moving gigs of the last five years. A success. The band decided to start working on the new album as this new collaborative four piece, to recapture the emotional power of the Coleman evening and then add Alun and Emma's heart-rendering lyrics.

If that seems like all too much, too rich, it occasionally is. Though great, The Great Eastern was an album of fragments, made by four disparate talents, an album that finally came together when mixed by the now famous Mr Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev), in Tarbox Road Studios in Upstate New York. Hate, on the other hand, was made by a very different band, a band who knew how they wanted to sound right from the start.

The compelling simplicity of the Coleman music, plus the sense of the band trying to get back what they'd lost that night, gives the album a feeling of sweet poignancy and childlike sadness even before we get to the lyrics. Plus, the band have gone through a hell of a lot since that night. It's not our place to tell you everything here but suffice to say that people's lives can be touched by all kinds of trauma and loss in a very small space of time and The Delgados have had their fill. As a result, the music on Hate drips with a mournful beauty – a beauty of strummed guitar, lone piano, strings and cinematic drift – even before you get to the lyrics.

Ah, but the lyrics. As anyone who fell in love with The Great Eastern will tell you, Emma Pollock and Alun Woodward write songs of wonder, adult fairy tales that view the damaged and troubled everyday world with a bold clarity, black humour and sweet sadness. If the band describe Hate as "an album of extreme negativity and extreme revelation" an album born of depression, it's worth baring in mind that we're talking the kind of depression that draws the negatives, and positives of life up into an exaggerated, hallucinatory whole, from depression to release, all perfectly engineered by Delgados' fifth member, Tony Doogan.

When Hate was finished the band went back to Dave Fridmann. This time there was no salvage operation, no extensive re-working of material. In fact, a lot of the time Fridmann left tracks alone, there was nothing he could add. Rare compliment indeed.

And that's the end of the story.

So, Hate then, an album drawn from the dark side of MGM musicals, where, just when things can't get any sadder, people just have to sing. An album of dark nursery rhymes for grown-ups.

"Hate is an overused word but an under realised reality," says Alan, "it's there every day, the one facet that raises the successful 21st century man above other people. We've got to a point where we don't believe there's any light in peoples character. Hate is all around but, in the end, love is the only thing that will save your life."

Hate is all you need. Goodnight children.

...written September 2002