Last week, the band formerly known as British Sea Power announced that they would be going by a new name: Sea Power. They provided some explanation at the time, writing that “we always wanted to be an internationalist band but maybe having a specific nation state in our name wasn’t the cleverest way to demonstrate that.”

And they expanded on their reasoning in a new piece for The Guardian in which they say the change “triggered more news coverage than we imagined possible” and note that their name is “something we’ve been thinking about for years.”

“If we were called British Motorcycle Club we wouldn’t be changing our name,” they wrote. “It was the combination of ‘British’ and ‘Power’ that no longer worked for us,” continuing:

We imagined a youngster at a European festival in the 21st century looking at the programme and seeing a band name including the word “Hungarian” or “Russian” alongside “Power”. It would likely send your mind in a certain direction – quite possibly to the isolationist, adversarial nationalism that has recently taken a hold around the world. We’ve always wanted to be an internationalist band – as heralded in our track Waving Flags, a song of pan-European idealism.

We are in no way disowning our past – we remain proud of the British Sea Power discography. We remain proud of our soundtrack to the 2012 film From the Sea to the Land Beyond, an extended audiovisual love letter to this maritime nation. But becoming simply Sea Power feels like a new start. Now maybe we can just connect with that elemental power of the sea, something that increasingly seems both awesome and frightening.

Read their full Guardian piece here.

Sea Power have a new album, Everything Was Forever, out next year.