Success has its price, and for Keane shifting five million copies of their debut album transported them to a world of schmoozing, charity telethons and celebrity for which they were totally unprepared. Under the Iron Sea is evidence, however, that they toughened up before sudden fame could eat them alive.

It was a close-run thing but the brickbats thrown at them for being part of the axis of power balladeering evil that includes Coldplay brought a positive response. Under the Iron Sea is a major stride forward, an album that distils all the elements that worked so successfully before — the gentleness, the sensitivity, the melodic ear — and scales them up exponentially.

The key to this is the playing of Tim Rice-Oxley, who drills away at the keys of his electric piano and forces it through a bank of effects pedals as if summoning up the lead guitarist they once possessed. The resultant noise is massive, beginning with Atlantic, a huge swell of a song from which you can see the clouds building threateningly. It’s falling barometric pressure presages the squall of wah-wah howls that rip through the magnificent single Is It Any Wonder?, the vortex of reverbed notes swirling through the deeply disillusioned A Bad Dream and the siren cry that wails through Broken Toy.

For a band of quiet, reticent types, they now put up a forbidding wall of sound, with the drummer Richard Hughes battering his kit and even stripping it down to a four/four kickdrum on Broken Toy. Against this Tom Chaplin’s cherubic voice might have struggled but he rises gamely above the dense sound as it crashes around him, grappling with existential emptiness on Nothing in My Way and Broken Toy and even raging at the Iraq War on A Bad Dream.

Under the Iron Sea makes a fair case for Keane to be recategorised as a power trio.

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