Familia is an appropriate name for Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s latest album – because she had her new born son right beside her in the studio.

The songstress started work on the record, the follow-up to her smash-hit Wanderlust album, just weeks after giving birth to her fourth child, Jesse.

“You want to have your little buddy in your arms all the time, and everybody in the band is a parent too, so there were loads of people I could give him to for a cuddle while I was singing,” says Sophie, who plays Oran Mor on Tuesday.

“I couldn’t have done the album if he wasn’t there with me, my brain couldn’t function without that! It was that or nothing would have been done.

Wanderlust was quite the departure for Sophie, shifting the focus away from the dance-floor fillers she’d previously enjoyed hits with to a darker, more atmospheric sound, touching upon anything from Eastern European folk to baroque music.

Familia continues with some of that, but also features some big pop songs, from powerful opening track Wild Forever to lead single Come With Us, an upbeat tune about joining a cult.

“Wanderlust had that very Eastern European feel, so there was a kneejerk reaction from me and Ed (Harcourt, who has produced both records) to flip that,” explains Sophie.

“After Wanderlust he went to Cuba and I went to Mexico on holiday. I’d been there before and I absolutely love it, so maybe that went in too.

“I would say the Latin American feel is like a filter that we put on the end, so it’s not there all the time. Wanderlust has this Eastern European feel but when I listen to it it’s like a love letter home in a way, and that’s true of this as well.”

Working with Ed Harcourt also continues the family theme, as he’s godfather to one of her children, and, she says, someone more talented musically than she is.

“This will sound twee but when my mum got together with my stepdad she said ‘you know you’re with the right person if you always think your other half is a better person than you are’ and I know what she means with that,” she says.

“I definitely have it with Richard (Jones, her husband) romantically but I think you can have it with people you work with, too.

“If I could do some of the things the musicians in my band could do then I’d be printing T-shirts to tell everybody, but they just get on with it.”

This seems a harsh judgement. Since her early days with indie band Theaudience and then a chart-topping collaboration with dance act Spiller, Sophie has impressively remained a chart fixture throughout her career.

She’s also fronted a TV documentary earlier this year about the rise of social media, which saw her copy Kim Kardashian’s Instagram poses for a couple of weeks.

“I tried to do a slightly tongue in cheek version of them,” laughs the singer.

“I was lucky though, because she only posted about five times and she was wearing clothes in all of them. Maybe she knew and was going ‘oh, that girl with 0.2% of my followers is copying me so I better be good’.”

However despite her varied career her love of old school disco and dance music still shines through.

“I love things like the Paradise Garage, or those extended remixes – that’s how I found Take Me Home for the first album, actually,” she enthuses.

“Then there’s stuff like the Thelma Houston version of Don’t Leave Me This This Way. You get so used to hearing them that they become like musical wallpaper because you know them so well, and then you’ll be in the back of a cab late at night and one of them will go on, and you go ‘wow, that’s incredible’. Disco has so much joy, and I love that.”

Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Oran Mor, Tuesday, £20, 7pm