Arriving alone and early at an Arcade Fire show about 18 months ago, I slunk into a corner of Alexandra Palace and whiled away the time by taking out my laptop. In a near-empty venue, this was enough for a nearby punter to ask what I did for a living. “You might have heard of my brother. He’s called Jack Peñate,” he said. Then, almost under his breath, he added, “I don’t know if you’re a fan...”

His tone — somewhere between pride and sadness — spoke volumes about the critical reception afforded to Matinée, his brother’s debut album. Jack was wounded by some of the comments, his brother said. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but why the hatred? And why so personal? I nodded. It was — save for the faux-worldly geezerdom, the strangulated vocals, the almost total absence of musical ambition and the unrelenting, nail-scraping jauntiness that pervaded almost every song — a complete mystery.

You suspect that some sections of the music press will be congratulating themselves on the total sonic overhaul ushered in by Everything is New. It might just be, though, that Peñate’s wisest move was executed even before the release of his first album. How, after all, do we suppose he must have felt being signed to XL — the home to era-defining innovators such as Radiohead, Friendly Fires and Dizzee Rascal — with an album that sounded like the Housemartins on tartrazine?

By working backwards from this exhilarating record, we can probably guess the answer. For the first time, Peñate doesn’t sound as if he’s in a hurry to get somewhere. As such, it makes sense that the recent single Tonight’s Today, a song about getting loved up and lost in one long hedonistic moment, was the first song he completed for the album. On Everything is New, it serves as a kind of signpost to the other eight songs. He isn’t the first indie musician to discover the citrusy zip that clipped, Nigerian-style high-life guitars can confer on a pop record, but unlike his critically adored labelmates in Vampire Weekend, highlights such as Give Yourself Away and Be the One are utterly purged of collegiate self-consciousness.

Be it through music or love, on the title track the 24-year-old sounds reborn. “I’d seen all these buildings all of my life/ They were just another part of the sky,” he sings over a tribal rolling-stock funk and glissando harp flourishes. Even when slowing down the pace for Every Glance, Peñate’s music benefits from a lithe new sensuality and a bona fide sense of adventure.

Residual incredulity at the speed of this change makes it tempting to attribute much of what’s good about Everything is New to the producer du jour Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, Friendly Fires). But, in the eagerness to please an imagined panel of peers and pundits, countless artists have squandered their existing fanbase for albums that effectively flush out the person who made them.

Perhaps the biggest triumph of Everything is New is that it has found a proper use for Peñate’s personality. The reason he was hurt by the reaction to his first album was that, deliberately or otherwise, he used his openness to try to mitigate the narrow horizons of his music. This time, his openness is the music.

XL, TS £11.74

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