overpass - elsewhere, always

If you're gonna have swagger, the best place to have it is on a debut album. The sound of a band that doesn't yet know what they're meant to be embarrassed about is intoxicating, often because the answer is nothing and self-doubt is for cowards. overpass formed in Birmingham in the weeks before lockdown stuck a padlock on every venue door in the country, spent the years since building what they'd cooked up gig by gig, and released two EPs to sketch the lines before 'Elsewhere, Always' arrived to colour everything in. Ten entirely new songs, no old singles smuggled in to pad the numbers, no tasteful swerve towards whatever's getting playlisted this month. Just choruses, enormous ones, and the nerve to trust they'll deliver. Which they do.

'Union Station' opens at full sprint, Max Newbold's falsetto riding a rhythm section that doesn't blink. It sets out an all-too-identifiable canvas: that stretch of your early twenties when the safety of the A-to-B of further education ends, and everyone else suddenly seems to have a clear set of instructions on what to do next. 'Sandman' chews on insomnia until it turns to scuzz, 'Is This Real?' makes early-adult exhaustion sound strangely optimistic, and 'Spinning' apparently nearly didn't make the album at all, which would have cost it its heaviest, most cathartic moment.

The conviction extends to songs that break the formula. 'Bonnie & Clyde Pt. 2' is Newbold alone with an acoustic guitar, kept exactly as demoed because nothing the full band tried could improve it. 'Get Up!', written in a last-week heatwave, is more or less a dance track, and a brilliant one. Closer 'Heaven' floats where everything before it drives, the strongest hint that there are more gears here than anyone has yet seen, and not all of them go faster.

Recorded in Liverpool with Rich Turvey, the four of them living on top of each other for weeks, it has the warmth of a band who would be doing this regardless of who was watching. There's a nostalgic glow to these songs, a sense of something half-remembered from a great summer that hasn't happened yet, but no borrowed clothes. This is music built for rooms full of people losing it, by a band who clearly itch to get back to them whenever they're apart. Guitar music keeps being told it doesn't really produce headliners any more, and certainly not ones who can raise a rabble at will. Nobody appears to have mentioned it to overpass, and on the strength of 'Elsewhere, Always', it's probably best nobody does. They'd be wasting their breath anyway.