They were a supergroup with the world at their feet, but they let their world implode. After a “long hiatus”, Black Country Communion are back, with a new album and a new perspective, having been reminded that “we make a really good racket when we don’t get in our own way”.

It seems nobody told Glenn Hughes that lead singers are supposed to be fashionably late – for everything. On a recent Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, the veteran vocalist/bassist arrives at photographer Neil Zlozower’s studio before any of the other members of his band, Black Country Communion.

“I never went in for the prima donna shit,” he says with an elegant yet dismissive wave of his hand. “Believe me, I’ve seen enough of that behaviour over the years. I could give lessons if I wanted to. No good can come from it. Be a pro, I say.”

Guitar ace Joe Bonamassa is next in the door, and he quickly informs Zlozower that he’s on the clock. Bonamassa keeps to a tight schedule most of the time, and tomorrow morning he’s flying to Havana to shoot a documentary. “We’re going to do a reverse Buena Vista Social Club thing,” he says. “I’m gonna grab a bunch of Cubans and try to play the blues with them. We’ll see what happens. If it works, that’ll be great. If it doesn’t, well, it’ll be a different kind of film.”

Hughes and Bonamassa greet each other with warm hugs and spend a few minutes catching up on their recent activities. Their camaraderie is natural and unforced – and somewhat surprising, given the way the two musicians sniped at each other on social media back in 2012, a bitter public exchange that resulted in the fast implosion of Black Country Communion following the release of their third album, Afterglow. “We were like visionaries,” Bonamassa says. “Glenn and I invented mean tweets before they became presidential.”

Hughes lets out a good-natured laugh, perhaps hoping to downplay the experience. But Bonamassa is serious – he seems to regard the matter with a sense of pride: “Well, we did invent mean tweets. We should get ahead of that and own it.”

Owning their past is something the members of Black Country Communion are slowly coming to terms with. And they have good reason to, as it now seems as if they’re bucking for a future. They’ve got a righteous and robust new album, BCC IV, out this month, and they don’t mind if you refer to it as a comeback.

“It’s our first record in five years – I guess that’s what you call it,” Hughes says. “But here’s the thing: it’s really a great record. When you hear it, you’re hearing me going back to my roots.”

He beams a high-wattage smile and adds: “I can’t be modest about this. I just have to crow. I’m such fan of this band. If I weren’t in this band, I would want to be in this band.”

Without prompting, he’s quick to stress that the disharmony between him and Bonamassa wasn’t as deep-seated and explosive as had been reported when the whole thing collapsed. “It was more like misunderstandings,” he says. “Joe and I had never fallen off the rails. That’s a big misconception. Oh, sure, there were some moments we went: ‘Oh, God. What now?’ But we were always friends. It wasn’t like other bands that have these really horrible break-ups.”

He pauses, searching for the right words. “And ours wasn’t so much a break-up as it was a long hiatus.”

“It’s true,” Bonamassa interjects. “We never actually lost contact. We just stopped playing. And that was a shame, because Glenn is the whole reason why I got into this thing. I was a huge Glenn Hughes fan. I was honoured to be in a band with him.” He throws the singer a smile. “And I still am.”

Black Country Communion began as the brainchild of producer Kevin Shirley, who has worked as Bonamassa’s regular sonic architect and chief confidant since the two first worked together on the guitarist’s You & Me album in 2007. After witnessing an impromptu jam between Bonamassa and Hughes, Shirley brought in drummer Jason Bonham and former Dream Theater keyboard player Derek Sherinian with the idea of putting a fresh coat of paint on 70s-era classic rock.

“I thought they could be a hark back to the glory days of great bands like Free, Bad Company, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple,” Shirley recalls. “And boy, did we have the right personnel! Those were my exact thoughts when putting these guys together. The reason why I thought Derek Sherinian was a good idea was, after working with him on a Dream Theater album, I thought that the progressive rock element he could bring could introduce an interesting new dynamic to the group.”

Sherinian arrives at the studio next, and he too greets his bandmates affectionately. He looks fit and healthy, radiating a cool confidence – a swagger, really – to go along with his newly toned‑up physique. “I got divorced and then I hit fifty,” he says. “You get to a point where you wanna look good, you know?”

He says he had few expectations when he was first brought into the project. “I got a call from Kevin, who asked if I wanted to record a few songs in Malibu for a couple of days. I knew of Glenn and Jason, but I didn’t know Joe at all. We weren’t even thinking of doing a whole album at that point, much less anything else.”

Those couple of days got extended to a full week, by which time the quartet’s song fragments and jams had morphed into an entire album of hard-hitting blues-based hard rock. “It came together so quickly,” says Bonamassa. “What started out as this experiment became something bigger. I don’t think anybody gave anything much thought until we heard the first mixes, and then we went: ‘Wow! This is pretty damn good.’ It was classic rock but with new songs. It had that old seventies feel but it didn’t sound dated in any way. Once everybody heard it, we all thought: ‘I think we might have something here.’”

Patting Bonamassa on the knees, Hughes says: “It was pretty obvious that these four talents together were the right guys at the right time. It was like, okay, now here’s a band.’

“Right. But it was never micro-managed,” Bonamassa stresses, “like we were in a boardroom or something. So we all decided, okay, we’ve got something here, let’s make it work.”