Dubliner Simon Kenny, aka Si Schroeder, has produced an album of strength and depth that will draw you in and keep you listening. He talks to Jim Carroll

THIS year, as usual, there will be many thousands of new albums released. The vast majority will pass you by, another CD in a sea of shiny plastic. Some, though, will linger and you'll find yourself returning to them time and time again in search of another reminder of just why they stand out from the crowd.

Coping Mechanisms is set to be among this elite group. The work of Dublin-based musician Simon Kenny, who goes under the moniker of Si Schroeder, Coping Mechanisms will still be revealing layers of deep, emotional intensity when you're listening to it months from now.

Besides the remarkable ambition, confidence, scale and fidelity which Kenny demonstrates, there are some cracking songs onboard too. As collections of sweet, shy electronic pop tunes go, it's as smart an album as you'll ever encounter.

Today, Simon Kenny is doing his first interview about the new album. Indeed, as he remarks towards the end of the conversation, it's his first interview in years. Previously one half of Dublin dream-pop wannabes Schroeder's Cat, Kenny has spent quite a few years out of the promotional loop, wryly describing the period between 1998, when the Cat ceased activities, and now as "the wasteland years".

Yet he acknowledges that much learning was done during this time. "I had set myself the task of doing an album in time for my 30th birthday, but I'll be 32 this year, so I obviously didn't make that target. But I definitely laid the foundations during this time and I found the incentive to do it."

The more time Kenny put into his music, the more diverse it began to sound. "In your twenties, you become very focused on one particular kind of music because of your lifestyle and your friends. You find you're making music which directly reflects that and I know I certainly did that for a while. It all changed when I started to work on this record."

The diversity of sounds you can hear on Coping Mechanisms makes for a highly attractive album. Kenny thinks of this spread as "a little road-trip through my record collection" with room for folky bits, his old guitar drones, flashes of mainstream albums he likes, such as Paul Simon's Graceland and, of course, the far-out electronica terrain he once patrolled.

Those dabblings with electronic music led to a release or two as Schroedersound ("it was my chance to have a DJ name and make abstract music"), but Kenny found it didn't lead anywhere else.

"I was never interested enough in electronica music to fully pursue it," he says. "I don't think I had any real interest in technology. I'd reach a point and that was it, I had all the gadgets and software I needed to make what I wanted to make. There is a point where you want to express yourself rather than learn something for its own sake."

When you listen to Coping Mechanisms, it's the lyrics and song structure which may surprise you. They did, after all, surprise Kenny. "I thought I had abandoned any idea of a lyrical dimension, but it came to the fore during the making of this record. The vocals and lyrics are crucial to making the album stand out.

"Anyone can mess around with effects modules and processors, but the mechanics of songwriting become a challenge when you have to bring a song to just guitar and voice and it still works."

Kenny's fascination with songs extends far beyond the usual classic songwriting suspects. "When you talk about songs now, people think you mean something classic from the Sixties or the Seventies, The Beatles or The Beach Boys. I was more interested in stuff which was considerably earlier than that, certain melodic structures and textural arrangements that would have been familiar around the time of 78s.

"The emotional sentiment you'll find in that older music also attracted me because it's so hard to create strong emotional content and melodies in instrumental electronic music. Electronica is all texture, not melodies. It's more lifestyle music."

The title, Kenny explains, comes from observing how friends and colleagues of his deal with living in 21st-century Dublin. "The nature of living in Dublin has definitely influenced the themes on this record. There's no doubt that it has become increasingly difficult to live here, so people use mechanisms and quirks to cope with living here and staying sane."

While Kenny kept his demons at bay by making this record, he sees others turning to tried and tested solutions. "Alcohol and narcotics have long being coping mechanisms for Irish people. It's a way of coping with the claustrophobic nature of the country. There aren't that many outlets for self-expression, there aren't that many ways you can go, so people just use alcohol to help them survive."

For Kenny, the record may well provide him with an exit from such confinement. "It would be lovely if the record took off somewhere I'd actually like to live, like Germany," he says with a smile. He talks about Berlin as a possible new base, a city where his live shows to date have always been well-received.

Yet he's also aware that Dublin provides much more than just shelter from the rain. "I found when I was writing this record that Dublin is a minefield for inspiration. There are so many stories and so many ideas and you really do need something to engage with on that level when it comes to writing the songs."

For now, though, all talk of next steps and next records (he's confident he has the guts of the second album already in the bag) will take a back-seat. The next months will involve Kenny bringing Coping Mechanisms to anyone who's prepared to listen. What they'll hear is an album well worth their time and attention.

"The record is the main thing on the table right now," he says. "It took an awful lot of work and a lot of that work was quite hermitic. To come over ground six months later and realise that people like it is very reassuring and a real confidence booster for me."

Coping Mechanisms is out now on Trust Me I'm A Thief Records. Si Schroeder plays Spirit Store, Dundalk tonight, in-store at Tower Records, Dublin tomorrow afternoon and Roisin Dubh, Galway on Sunday.