When Hamilton indie-rockers the Delgados split up in April 2005, it all happened rather abruptly. After more than a decade in the band, during which time they gained a Mercury Music Prize nomination and some minor chart success, bass-player Stewart Henderson suddenly decided to leave.

Since that bewildering day, however, events have been moving rather less rapidly than the band's former frontwoman Emma Pollock would have desired. Although she signed a solo deal shortly after the group disbanded, her debut album, Watch the Fireworks, is only now ready for release, 18 months after work began on it.

The delay has been frustrating, and Pollock is clearly champing at the bit to get going. She admits that she felt the album was finished more than a year ago, but then everything went "pear-shaped". Her record company wanted it re-mixed, after which it became subject to the achingly slow machinations of the music industry.

"I'm relieved it's coming to its conclusion now," she says. "I began to lose sight of the end, because it's horrible when things get shifted like that. But, actually, it was the right thing to do - it sounds really, really good now. I mean, I loved it before, but you never quite know how good something can be until you have the opportunity to hear a better version."

Watch the Fireworks is worth the wait. It began life as an acoustic album, but has blossomed into something much bigger and brighter than that. Recorded in the renowned music hubs of New York and Blantyre, it's a fresh, dynamic record, half punchy pop and half introspective balladry, nimbly avoiding the singer-songwriter's pitfalls of self-indulgence and solemnity. Delgados fans will find several reference points to hang on to, but this clearly marks the beginning of a new chapter in Pollock's career. "I still write in much the same way, at the early stages," she says. "But things have changed when it comes to putting a record together."

Most of the more introspective material was written shortly after the shock demise of the band, which left her asking: what now? "When you've been in a band for ten or 12 years and after one meeting you realise it's actually over, that's really, really odd," she says. "It's probably not dissimilar to well, it felt like getting a divorce, to be honest. None of us had had an argument, none of us were overly emotional about it - we just talked about it and then went home. It was a weird time."

The ties that bind Pollock to her former bandmates haven't been severed entirely by the split. After all, she is married to erstwhile Delgados drummer Paul Savage, with whom she has a baby son, and all the ex-members are still involved in the running of their influential independent record label, Chemikal Underground, and the associated studio Chem 19 in Blantyre, where most of Watch the Fireworks was recorded. "There is still a big common purpose between us all," says Pollock, although she adds that it took her a while to pluck up the courage to play her old bandmates her new music. "They're very curious about it all," she laughs.

Tonight's T on the Fringe show marks the beginning of a series of live performances that will take her up to the end of the year. She is supporting King Creosote in September, and will then spend five weeks in North America opening for the New Pornographers, before embarking on a headlining tour of the UK before Christmas. It's an experience she is both looking forward to and dreading. Since the arrival of her son, she explains, touring has become much tougher. "It's one of the hardest things I've ever known. It's a constant battle that's never reconciled. It's tough when you're driving down an empty road in middle America with a pretty horrible motel room to look forward to. You start chewing your arm off to get back home."

Nonetheless, she is looking forward to playing to audiences who will finally be able to recognise her new songs. "It will change things once the album's out there and people know what I'm doing and are able to take part," she says. There will, though, be no room for any Delgados material. "I'm not trying to run away from that. I'm happy to always have that remembered - it's a huge part of my life, and something I'm really proud of - but playing the songs would feel a little cheap." Instead, she's hoping people will give her solo compositions a fair hearing, rather than get bogged down in "dewy-eyed memories". Given the quality of her new material, that really shouldn't be a problem.

  • Emma Pollock plays Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, tonight. Watch the Fireworks is due for release by 4AD on September 17.