Yet again, London’s satellite city (Oxford) has produced another corking guitar band, this time in the shape of Spring Offensive. Their slow but steady rise into the spotlight, along with some wonderful early releases, have won them plenty of grassroots support – and debut album Young Animal Hearts aims to spread the love for the five-piece.

Undoubtedly, Spring Offensive know how to inject drama into a moment. “Not Drowning But Waving”, the album’s opener, is a perfect example of the song-writing-as-bell-curve form which is espoused over these 11 tracks. So many of the tracks on Young Animal Hearts swell with emotion, creating intricate mosaics of guitar motifs and vocal, which then peter out like waves washing out from the sand.

“Body Lifting” showcases the group’s emotive harmonies, executed with the precision and clarity of cut glass. It’s rhythmic and charged with tension. “Speak” is also driven by rhythm and loaded with the same charge. These tracks shed light on a very different side of Spring Offensive; one that doesn’t centre on creating a brooding, melancholic haze (Case in point, “The River”), but which shifts through moods, playing with light and shade, making you want more.

The atmospheric moments on this album drift towards the uncanny at times, creating a strange sense of deja-vu. Unfortunately, this is not because any tracks on the album sound anything remotely like early solo-career Beyonce. “Cut the Root”, whilst elegant in its gossamer textures and ragged rhythms, strongly recalls the opening of Foals’ “Spanish Sahara”. “Young Animal Hearts”, with it’s carefully counted, rhythmically complex guitar riffs, also nods to tracks such as “Two Steps Twice”, yet no track here ever manages to match the swelling energy of that particular math-rock-esque anthem.

This stylistic similarity is far from a deal-breaker. Although, let’s face it, if you’re a guitar band from Oxford, there are two groups you don’t want to sound like. And Foals is one of them. (Well done on sounding nothing like Radiohead though, guys – if that’s an achievement?)

Spring Offensive might be seen as likely candidates to step into alt-J’s shoes as this year’s torchbearers of intelligent British guitar music. In all honesty, they are probably not yet equipped to fill that particular triangular-shaped hole in the market. This album shows a nous for songwriting, and deftly deploys delicate textures and angular rhythms, but without a stellar vocalist or the sheer energy and inventiveness which marks the work of every other band mentioned in this piece, Young Animal Hearts can only do so much.

This album is a collection that, much like the British spring itself, is largely fair to middling, but which is also punctuated by points of real beauty. In these moments you get the sense that, given time, Spring Offensive could blossom into something truly remarkable.