Death Cab For Cutie's eighth album, Kintsugi, is the band's first since frontman Benjamin Gibbard's highly publicised 2012 divorce from actress Zooey Deschanel. It's not something the songwriter shied away from on the record. No Room In Frame is about his marginalised feelings, while The Ghosts Of Beverley Drive and Ingenue paint unflattering portraits of celebrity life in Los Angeles.

"Everybody knows the story of my personal life, to some extent, over the last four or five years, so I didn't feel it was necessary to go into detail about all that stuff," Gibbard, 38, says.

"But, when you have a traumatic experience in your life, such as a divorce, there's a lot of unpacking that you have to do to understand why things turned out the way they did. A lot of those reasons and triggers are something that I would never share with anyone else in my life but my closest confidantes. But unpacking a series of events in songs can be hugely beneficial; in this case, it helped me to understand the fallout of my marriage more clearly. And, for that reason, I'm glad I wrote these songs that I did.

"There was a brief period of time in which I contemplated not touching any of it, not even alluding to it, and I realised through conversations with friends, and starting to write songs, that the only way I'd be able to transcend this period in my life would be to write about it.

"That's how I've gone through every other emotional hardship in my life, so why should this be any different?"

Across their career, Death Cab For Cutie have been renowned for the emotional quality of their songs; swelling alt-rock ballads built around Gibbard's heart-on-sleeve lyricism.

Formed in Seattle in 1994, the band have been based around the creative partnership between Gibbard, their songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Chris Walla, their producer.

However, during the making of Kintsugi, Walla withdrew - first saying he didn't want to produce it (after producing every previous record), then ceding creative decisions to Gibbard, before finally quitting the band after recordings were done.

"Chris could speak to, exactly, when he felt like he was leaving the band," Gibbard says.

"But to me it felt like he'd had one foot out of the band for years.

"His decision was clearly a long time coming, given our personal relationship over the years. Not that it was necessarily adversarial, but it was a complicated creative relationship."

When they set out recording Kintsugi, Walla argued that the songs on the album were too personal, too specific; Gibbard countered that his songs were always that way. Gibbard's song-writing oeuvre, he considers, is "the minutia of human relations".

Speaking from his home in Seattle, the fact that it's the July 4 long weekend - "where inexperienced drinkers get to handle explosives, with suitably disastrous results" - has Gibbard well aware that he's never tried to write topical or political songs.

"If I was to take a left turn and start writing political songs, I'm not sure if people would follow me there," he says.

Yet, Gibbard has hardly been apolitical. He's long spoken out about marriage equality and his sister's same-sex union.

"With US Supreme Court recognising gay marriage on a federal level, and also upholding the ACA - aka Obamacare," Gibbard says: "Those were two pretty great moments of recent, for me and everyone I know, to feel like our country is inching towards a place where we take care of our citizens, and treat them with dignity."