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When Chilli Jesson was 14 years old, he lost his father to drug addiction. A grieving teenage boy, he did what most grieving teenage boys would do in that situation: he acted out, battered by the unfairness of the world and its cold hard realities, and then he buried his feelings down deep.

However then, with the arrival of his band Palma Violets, his life took a very atypical turn. At 19, Jesson found himself plastered on the cover of the NME and hailed as the most exciting new British group since The Libertines. Palma Violets’ first ever single was Radio One’s Hottest Record in the World; their incendiary clarion call ‘Best of Friends’ ended 2012 as NME’s Track of the Year. For a boy who’d not long had his life turned entirely upside down, it was all a very good way to pretend that nothing was wrong… “It was all just pushed away and I think, for me, it was about shutting it all off,” he recalls. “But then, when Palmas finished… I mean, I thought that would be forever. I was so positive about it. So when it’s taken away or it runs its course, it becomes very empty on the other side…”

Still only in his early twenties when his first band called time, Jesson set about trying to carve out something new. He started a second outfit Crewel Intentions, and then, struggling for money and feeling “spat out by the industry”, answered a call from someone looking to hire an

indie-minded songwriter to work on a pop project. “I was working behind the bar and I thought, fuck it. And it turned out I was good at it, which was surprising to me, so I started to write a bunch of my own stuff that was more pop,” he recalls of his then-third musical foray under his own name. “When you’re skint and you wanna be in music you think, maybe this is who I am? And it was brilliant - I signed again for the first time since Rough Trade with Palma Violets, which made me think I was definitely on the right road. And then the A&R who believed in me as this pop star left, and it all shattered again.”

He recalls feeling so burnt and saddened that, for a long time, he stopped listening to the raw, magnetic band music that had always been his bread and butter. “I was so scared of already being nostalgic at such a young age,” he admits. But just as it appeared that Jesson was down for the count, in stepped Fontaines DC. “I got the call to go on the road with them and it was this transformative moment where I opened up that door again,” he grins. “I felt so inspired, it was insane. They were supporting Arctic Monkeys and it was two of my favourite bands playing together in the US; it was like a dream. It made me realise: fucking hell, pop is not me. This is who I really am.”

If Jesson’s career trajectory reads something like the Rocky Balboa of indie but with better hair, then it’s with good reason. He’s someone you can’t help but root for, but his early dealings with loss have also made him tenacious almost to a fault. “I don’t think I’d have the drive to do a lot of the things I’ve done without it, because there isn’t a safety net,” he suggests. Meanwhile in recent years, his friends have started to experience their own griefs too; an old hand at it all, Jesson became the person they would turn to for advice and comfort. And so slowly, with his musical life back on course on the road with Fontaines, and his personal life starting to give a new, more approachable shape to those old wounds, he sat on the tour bus and began to finally write his story.

Dead Dads Club is, from its knowing title outwards, a place for anyone who needs it. The first rule of Dead Dads Club is you can talk about whatever you want. Inspired by The Flaming Lips and their ability to write a truly narrative-driven concept record, Jesson wanted to put it all out there: no mystery, no metaphor. The MO was that it would be “very clear and direct. I didn’t want to hide behind anything. I just wanted it to be on the nose.”

The album, written alongside bandmate Rupert Greaves and produced by Fontaines DC’s Carlos O’Connell, maps a chronology of the years directly around Jesson’s father’s passing: from the open letter to his 13-year-old self of ‘Only Just Begun’ to the final, euphoric paean to survival of ‘That’s Life’. In between are some of the most musically vibrant, vital songs that he’s penned in his career to date: as sonically inspired and robust as they are lyrically open and vulnerable. His two creative foils were hugely important in bringing these tracks to life. Rupert takes the vocal lead on ‘Junkyard Radiator’ and ‘Hospital Pillow’ - the former, a deceptively melodic yet suitably disorientating meditation on drug dependency; the latter, a short and sweet memory built around a Beck-like swagger.

Carlos, meanwhile, helped amp up the sonic world of ‘Dead Dads Club’ hugely. Lead single ‘Don’t Blame The Son For The Sins Of The Father’ - a gritty, visceral rock’n’roll highlight that details his troubled teenage relationship with his mother (“People say I look like my dad, and maybe there was a connection there where she was just seeing him in me”) - encapsulates the producer’s magic touch. “It’s such an ambitious song to pull off; it’s essentially two songs in one where it’s really hard and then it breaks into this really open, angelic backing vocal,” Jesson says. “I’ve been really fortunate to work with loads of brilliant producers over the years and I’ve never seen someone at the height of their powers like that - so confident and so brave.”

On the Jack White-like riffs of ‘Goosebumps’, they channel it into a track that rails against adults in positions of power that let you down again and again; ‘Running Out of Gas’ finds the musician looking back at a snapshot memory of an argument in a supermarket over frustrated, rousing acoustic guitars, while ‘Need U So Bad’ tries to lift its author up from the mires of grief and back into the real world. Musically rich and varied, yet tied together by the very real story at its centre, perhaps ‘Need This’ and its love letter to music says all you need to know about Chilli Jesson right now. On October 14th, he’ll become a dad himself, but through the new highs and the old lows, there’s one thing that’s always been a constant.

“Even when I was working multiple jobs that I hated post-Palmas, I’d always carve out the time to write. I think when you live the dream as young as I did, there’s always this thought that it could be life-changing again,” he smiles. “It’s just about having the capacity to keep yourself in the race and totally believe in it. That’s all you really need.”

So, welcome to the Dead Dads Club. It’s a club no one asks to join, but once you’re in, you’re in for life.