Ryder-Jones’s only lifeline was writing songs with titles such as This Can’t Go On and Nothing To Be Done. From that horrendous period was born Iechyd Da, the most expansive and (surprisingly) hopeful record of his career. Since leaving psychedelic urchins The Coral in 2008, his tuneful late-night confessions have taken different forms – a Wirral Bill Callahan on 2013’s A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart, skewed indie-rock frontman on 2015’s West Kirby County Primary, king of pain on 2018’s Yawn – but never one so abundantly beautiful. Three years in the making, the album has the grand cosmic ache of Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs: big-sky music for introverts.

“Making the record becomes your life,” he says. “It’s a million miles away from when a group is three albums in and says, ‘We’ve got to get a synth.’ It was like, How the fuck am I going to get through this next two weeks? To write about myself and make it sound pretty just consumed me. Because I had so much time I just kept going. Like Forrest Gump.” He gives a rich, rueful laugh. “Keep running.”

To meet Ryder-Jones on home turf, you would never guess that he finds life a struggle. Still boyish and tousled, the 40-year-old is quick-witted, charming, an instant hit. His new girlfriend, up from London for the day, is clearly smitten when we later adjourn to the pub where he plays quizmaster every Monday night. In The Coral, his musical home between the ages of 13 and 25, Ryder-Jones’s ability to conceal his problems was itself a problem. Because he was mute in interviews and not yet a lyricist, nobody outside the band knew what he thought. Inside the band, his feelings were too easily occluded by skunk fumes. Only after he had left, in a state of psychic crisis, did he learn to stare his troubles in the eye.

“After my breakdown I thought it’s too much pressure pretending you’re fine,” he says. “I started being honest about myself and I couldn’t shut up.” He laughs at his own expense. “I’d spent years screaming into the void – someone pay attention! – but without actually saying anything, so I thought, Fuck it, I’ll do it.”

Ryder-Jones has learned to acknowledge Daniel – an eponymous song on West Kirby County Primary, a snapshot on the cover of Yawn – but for years that felt impossible. Eating pizza with The Coral one night, their eccentric manager Alan Wills (who died in 2014) said Daniel’s name for the first time. “He threw it out like it was nothing. That name at home was hushed if it was said at all. It was a massive moment in my life – a huge amount of relief.”

On the studio wall, opposite Goodison Park, hangs a framed photograph of the nascent Coral, lined up against a brick wall. They look startlingly young, and Ryder-Jones was the youngest of the lot: just 16 when they signed to Wills’ label Deltasonic and 18 when they released their debut album. “I was just a pothead who played guitar,” he says. “The early Coral years were mad, fun, lawless.” He was a riveting guitarist, attracting praise from Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. “I don’t even think I was the best guitarist in The Coral,” he demurs, “but I was very fucking young and I was mad as fuck.”

Among other things, Ryder-Jones had undiagnosed ADHD, complex PTSD and stage fright that caused him to vomit before shows: “That’s why I was so thin.” Looking back, he sees his mental health problems as an unexploded bomb that everybody was studiously ignoring, himself included. During the recording of The Coral’s fourth album, The Invisible Invasion, in 2005, panic attacks and night terrors precipitated his first breakdown and temporary departure. “I think the term was ‘go and get your head sorted.’ That was how it was back then.” Lured back too soon, for 2007’s Roots & Echoes, Ryder-Jones crashed again, much harder: agoraphobia, monophobia, dissociative disorder, total retreat from the world.

Ryder-Jones still has unresolved issues with The Coral but allows, “We were kids. I’m not angry at them for anything that happened to me. We all had to eat a bit of shit. A spoonful now and then doesn’t do you any harm.” He still sees the members who live in West Kirby, including regular pints with drummer Ian Skelly and a monthly coffee with frontman James Skelly, who experienced his own breakdown a few years after Ryder-Jones. “James was always very good at hiding that, as we all were. I’m without question the sanest member of that band.” He chuckles. “But certain members are tougher than I am. I was built a bit more crumbly: a Wensleydale as opposed to their Red Leicester.”

For a while, Ryder-Jones thought he was done with music forever. “I didn’t like it. It wasn’t making me happy.” He opted to study the social and economic history of Liverpool at the University of Liverpool (“the most Liverpudlian course!”) but could only manage three months. Eventually he returned to music because he didn’t know how else to live. “I had no money,” he says flatly. “I left The Coral with seven grand.”

Laurence Bell from Domino Records offered him a deal on the strength of his stark MySpace demos but Ryder-Jones’s first release, If…, was a form of concealment: an instrumental suite for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic based on Italo Calvino’s cult novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Due to his dissociative disorder, not yet medicated, Ryder-Jones can barely remember making it, but the warm reception was a pleasant shock: “I’d never really thought of myself as particularly talented.” Opening up in interviews encouraged him to do likewise in song, starting with the croaky, tentative folk-rock of 2013’s A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart.

If it seems extraordinary that Ryder-Jones was psychologically fit enough to play guitar on Arctic Monkeys’ 2013 stadium tour, then he’s as surprised as you are: “Honestly it kills me when I think back. I don’t know how I did it. It doesn’t feel like me.” The tour gave him a glimpse of the road not taken. “It was mad. Massive shows with people screaming all the time. And at the same time they’re just northern divvies like The Coral. I really enjoyed it. But I wouldn’t want to do it for a living. It’s not real life, that.”

Ryder-Jones’s love of ill-starred Americana has long been evident, but his new prowess in the producer’s chair enabled him to tap into two of his foundational influences, The Beatles and the Wu-Tang Clan. “There’s so much information in those records,” he gushes. “I wanted to make a record that had a lot going on.” In the case of the soaring, yearning Iechyd Da, “a lot” includes a children’s choir, a ghostly Gal Costa sample, disco strings, Easter-egg callbacks to his older songs and Mick Head reciting a passage from Ulysses.

It’s the first album that Ryder-Jones can listen to with unalloyed pleasure. With Yawn’s post-grunge requiem, he says, “The hope had completely fallen out of it.” This time, the most daring thing he could try was optimism, of a kind. “There’s something great about life,” he croons with dazed wonder on It’s Today Again. “But there’s something not quite right.” The house on the front cover and the collage of family photographs on the back are invitations to “a brighter world,” he says. “The idea is you open up and go in.”

He has a great therapist these days, he forces himself to exercise, and he’s delighted that mental health is no longer taboo, but nothing is easy. “It never goes away,” he says with an exhausted sigh. “I’ve just been managing. That’s how I live – just managing from one day to the next. Without drink or drugs I have not been calm or carefree for any period of time. I pretty much don’t leave West Kirby – certainly not on my own. It’s fucking shit but what are you going to do?”

Does he think it all comes back to that day in Wales in 1991?

“My family definitely has a genetic predisposition to mental ill health but my problems are very specific,” he says carefully. “It’s sort of textbook the way I’ve reacted to an event like that.” He clears his throat. “I can’t picture myself without Daniel’s death. Everything I have… When he died I started wearing his clothes. I started to play the violin and piano because he did – filling a hole for my mother. That took me on that journey and now I’m here and I’ve got a studio and it’s great.”

Ryder-Jones looks around the control room and falls silent, unsure what to do with the insoluble fact that the worst thing that ever happened to him is the reason why he is here.