The most glaringly notable facet of Mancunian sextet Help Stamp Out Loneliness‘ debut album is right up front, in singer D. Lucille Campbell. Everyone, it seems, makes the comparison to Nico but her low pitched, carefully enunciated while plaintively cawing vocal style isn’t something you hear often now to this degree, not exactly androgynous but far from girly. That she drops the line “won’t you let me be your Nico” into opening track ‘Cottonopolis & Promises’ (pertaining to her infamous relationship with John Cooper Clarke) suggests the band have heard this plenty enough, but there you go. It certainly carries the potential to clash with a band playing deceptively summery indiepop, but her ability to see-saw from come-on to flatly waiting to be impressed, or possibly heartbroken, makes them what they are.

So what are they? Co-produced by ‘fifth Smith’ Craig Gannon, their classic guitar melodies and hooks given a twist of underlying darkness are something he’d recognise, while the nods to indie disco heartbreak make them near neighbours of Camera Obscura. Beneath that, two keyboards add depth as well as twinkles and drones, occasionally subtly, often to drive on the insistent forward-going soar of the motorik/Stereolab influenced expansiveness. On ‘The Ghost With A Hammer In His Hand’ they borrow driving 80s synth sounds, but for once it’s the pan-European darkness of Propaganda it evokes, a conflicted Campbell ending up pining for doomed love. Sexual relation feature thoroughly here in their myraid states of being.

Otherwise it’s in the ballpark of sighing sandpaper-rough emotions against the most optimistic unaffected melodic pop. ‘Record Shop’ seems set for indiepop DJ sets from here to eternity, essentially a pop star stalker fantasist’s diary entries set to second hand organ and the kind of melodic pop light touch the Primitives or Britpop-era Lush perfected. The aforementioned ‘Cottonopolis & Promises’ unfolds into an insistently breezy love/hate letter to their home city that would make Stuart Murdoch sit up and think hard, later on complemented by ‘Palma Violence’, the sleekest of dire warnings that sounds like it could have come from a Janice Long show in 1985, or at least a cult Peel playlist, without seeming at all retro.

Really, though, Help Stamp Out Loneliness’ strength is that what they’re best at is difficult to pin down in precise words as opposed to being taken along by the waves of enthusiastically gorgeous, gloriously simple whirling melodies counterbalanced by some deeply unsure of the narrator’s self lyrics and with enough musical nous to stand out from an increasingly competitive specific market. These are the sorts of hooks successful bands all used to do. As seven minute closer ‘Split Infinitives’ coasts home on ever evolving layers of big guitar shapes, playful keyboards, Campbell’s swooping lead against cooing backing vocals and increasing levels of joy filled optimism climaxing in a full band choral quoting of the chorus from Arab Strap’s ‘The First Big Weekend’ before taking still several left interplay turns for a coda it’s like they never want it to end. You can understand how they feel. There’s glamour in that dirt.