How many indie acts have tried to pass themselves off as geeky misfits? They adopt NHS specs and second-hand threads with a notion that such trappings will somehow imbue them with hip-to-be-square kudos. The problem is that, beneath the veneer, these bands are often successful, good- looking and popular with girls, so that their heartfelt songs of boredom, frustration and social alienation ring a little hollow.

It’s a schtick that really works only when it’s not schtick at all, first mastered by Elvis Costello as he stepped out of a computing job and on to a stage, sneering Welcome to the Working Week without changing his clothes.

It’s this kind of grim authenticity that makes the Young Knives’ debut so remarkably good. The singer Henry Dartnall has spent the best part of a decade working in nondescript offices, the other two have considerable experience as HMV sales assistants — jobs not even crap enough to be romantic. Opening with Part Timer, they play themselves into a cathartic frenzy, spitting the mantra “I was bored, I was bored” through clenched crooked teeth, doing furious New-Wave fuzz hard enough to block out the whirr of the photocopier or the buzz of the fax.

If there’s angst, though, it’s a very English angst; gloom mixed with anxiety and withering gallows humour. “You were screaming at your mum and I was punching your dad!” is the yelped hook of She’s Attracted To, a song about battering the in-laws “under the security light” of their suburban house. Of course, it’s just idle office fantasy, Dartnall writing the words during a training day. Andy Gill, the former Gang of Four member who produced the album, must have jumped at the chance of working with a band blessed with such malleable psychosis and ear for melody. Decision and Weekends and Bleak Days both have danceable dynamics to spare, while In the Pink’s glam swing suggests there might be some Glitter Band hidden among their Buzzcocks records. Add an occasional moment of genteel surrealist reflection (Tailors, the wistful ode to tailoring), and you’ve got one of the finest debuts this year. Call it “outsider art”.

(Transgressive)

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