Due out mid-year, the new release will be called Home.

Chatting to the Mercury while doing some last-minute house-cleaning before starting a regional tour, Butler said the songs on Home are more about looking inward than out.

“They’re a lot more personal and a lot more existential,” Butler said.

“There’s only so many political songs I can write about assholes ruining the planet. I’ve written my fair share of them.

“These ones are a lot more soul-searching and lot more redemptive, looking at the relationship with one’s self and the relationship with others.”

While the album title Home comes from the name of one of its songs, Butler said there was a stronger meaning as well.

“I moved home this year,” Butler said.

“I moved back to the country, I moved back to some nature and took some time off the road.

“I just gave myself a little time, so there’s a lot of soul-searching kind of quality to some of the songs. And that title just seemed to make sense.”

In August last year the John Butler Trio released the song Bully, which Butler said won’t be on the new album.

“That was a stand-alone, that was something that I needed to see released in the political climate and  environment that was happening,” he said.

“It wasn’t going to be on the album because I had too many other songs that I really wanted on the album.

“So it was like ‘cool, let’s just put it out now, it seems to make sense in the Trump world that we live in’.”

 When it comes to the new songs, Butler plans to play “four or five of them” when the band hits Wollongong later this month.

He said it can be a bit nerve-wracking playing new songs in front of an audience for the first time – but it was also important to keep bringing new material into the set.

“You hope people like your new children as much as your old children,” he said.

“I don’t want to become a jukebox of myself, so it’s important to have part of the set as new songs.”

The John Butler Trio play the SummerSalt festival at Stuart Park on March 24.