The Quietus is getting rather excited at the prospect of a new Snowman album - and we'll have an interview with the Australian band in the next few weeks - so we're pleased to have been handed a taster in the form of 'Hyena', the first single to be taken from Absence.

You can listen to the track by clicking the SoundCloud player below:

Hyena by SNOWMAN

Talking about the album, meanwhile, Snowman's Joe McKee said: "The ideas grew from months of travel, being away from home and its comforts/familiarities. I ended up back in London with a wad of about 30 postcards I’d collected by various photographers. They all contained a similar mood, an un-nameable emotion. There was something both unsettling and soothing about them. There was an absence of something in each. A longing for something that no longer exists. I wanted to capture that emotion in an audible way as it seemed to capture that dislocated feeling we were all going through at the time.

"The album was written primarily in a flat in Walthamstow E17. Perhaps we were trying to channel the East17 spirit in our music. It truly was a house of love. We wanted to write something cathartic. We didn't want to repeat our previous album The Horse The Rat and The Swan. We trod that ground and wanted to keep moving forward. Throwing ourselves into the deep-end and trying to swim."

The record will be released on April 20.