The Streets’ Mike Skinner has set himself a deadline – one more album, then that’s it. No more albums by the Streets. After that, he can seemingly willingly give it all away, and spend the rest of his life watching his beloved Birmingham City.

“To be honest I think I’d rather be making music than watching Birmingham City!” Mike snorts in derision of his beloved hometown football side, currently sitting in the division below the Premier League. Besides, he argues, he’s not actually ‘retiring’ from the music world – he just wants to make a change. “I think I’ll still be making music, to be honest, but just under a different name,” he affirms.

Expectations are always high for each and every album by the Streets – the British press in particular salivate every time Skinner unleashes a new recording, and the fans are similarly thrilled when he delivers something new. But it’s not their expectations that concern him; it’s his own that weigh heavily on his mind.

“I think we put up barriers for what we think we are and what we think we want to be doing and I think getting rid of the name The Streets will help that,” Mike argues. “At the moment I’m putting all of my ideas into the next Streets album and I think it would be a mistake to box my ideas into any categories at the moment. I’m just throwing everything into the Streets and then seeing what happens after that.”

Already he’s been quoted as inferring that the final Streets album, the fifth under this moniker, will sound like Lou Reed’s Berlin. But Mike is quick to debunk this: “No, not Lou Reed’s Berlin – it’s just something I said on my blog and it was just something quite dark, and industrial [in terms of the sound to achieve]. I want it to be a lot of machines. I’d like to think it would be different, certainly. I just have to see how it goes really. Hopefully it will be quite futuristic.”

That’s a stark contrast with the latest album Everything Is Borrowed, in which heavy use is made of live instrumentation to give it a ‘natural’ feel. Nevertheless, the album has drawn strong comparisons with his debut, Original Pirate Material. Mike believes that has less to do with the sound of the album and far more to do with the subject matter, or the lack of a thematic theme that runs through it when compared with A Grand Don’t Come For Free or The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living. “In a way it’s not as focused on its story arc as a lot of my more recent stuff has been,” he says. “It’s its own thing really.”

The starting point for Everything Is Borrowed stemmed from the live shows that Mike performs as the Streets with his touring band. Because they had a natural affinity for creating music together and understanding what it is that they wanted to achieve, they were able to gel wonderfully well in the studio. With a lot of musicians on this album, it’s nevertheless not overcrowded with collaborations – which has been true of all the Streets albums. Mike has never cluttered albums, but instead has tried to cleave away as much fat as possible.

“It takes me a very long time to write the songs and to make them as clear as possible,” Mike says of the way the creative process works for him. “I just want to get them right. I think a lot of rap music is done fairly on the spot really, and so I guess I want to have the space and the time to get things sounding really focused.”

The focus of this record is a sense of positivity and looking forward, and looking for the best rather than the worst in life. “I did want to write positive songs,” he says, before admitting that “it was a very difficult album to make. The songs took a long time in terms of structure and every detail that gets kind of worked on – from the spacing of the words and melodies, and particularly the hooks. It’s a long process and in that sense sometimes I was really happy and sometimes I wasn’t.”

Yet it would seem, outside looking in, that it’s looking for the positive. “Totally. I’ve put everything I’ve got into the next album [when it’s being made], so I’m only ever thinking one or two years ahead in terms of my music.”

Putting every ounce of energy, creativity and devotion into the creation of each individual album sounds like an incredibly draining experience, especially so for the albums where Mike has created thematic records, let alone trying to making everything sound cohesive and fit. “It’s a great life,” he shrugs. “I get to express myself in any way that I want to, and that gives me a lot of enjoyment. Within that I definitely make it very difficult for myself.”

There’s a genuine philosophical nature to the new album – yet there’s no sense of pretension or artifice or even a saccharine nature to it. Nothing about it feels forced, or like something is being put on. It feels like it’s really, truly believed by the creator.

“I think it comes down to having… Very. Clear. Things. To. Say,” Mike emphasises. “ I think that’s why it comes across the way it does – they’re truths rather than emotions, and it’s what I’m trying to get across.”

The Streets’ Everything Is Borrowed is out now.