Sheppard play the waiting game

Sheppard have been one of the biggest successes in Australian pop music.

They went global with their infectious single Geronimo from debut album Bombs Away in 2014 and toured the world for two years off the back of its success.

But, three years later, a follow-up album still hasn't been released.

George Sheppard one of the group's main songwriters, says the second album has actually been ready to go for about a year, yet the band have so far released just two singles.

"We get frustrated by it because we've had this work, this art, finished for a whole year," George Sheppard told AAP.

"Personally I just want to release it. I'd release it tomorrow but we've got a whole team involved now of managers and labels and they are in charge of all of that, we just deliver the album, we write the songs and we wait."

If Sheppard released the album without putting proper thought into the timing, they fear things could backfire.

"You want the maximum amount of people to be paying attention to your band when you announce and release the album, because if you just drop it and release it then it's not new any more and people don't want to listen to it for some reason," George said.

The group have been burned by inopportune timing already this year with the release of their first new single while supporting Justin Bieber on his Australian tour.

"We actually released Keep Me Crazy during the tour because we thought that would be great exposure and great timing which it was, it was good timing, except for the fact that we released it on the same day as Ed Sheeran's album so that was a bit of a shame," Amy Sheppard said.

They're now approaching their music with a different strategy.

They have just released a new version of their song Edge of the Night featuring Colombian singer Sebastian Yatra.

Having already played at Brazil's Rock In Rio music festival this year, the band will head back to South America towards the end of the year to capitalise on their burgeoning fan base there.

Before that they'll be performing at the Melbourne Cup and have plans to put out an EP.

But the album is still on hold for now.

"We're sick of waiting to release music, so we've got to do an EP before the album," George said.

"We've still got to figure out whether we write new songs for that or write new ones for the album and take some album tracks over and put them on the EP. So that will come be in October some time."