NARCS could be the saviours of the modern musical age. No really, they could.

While everyone around them seems worried about their haircut, the labels they are wearing, the cash cow chorus, the stadium tour and their Instagram image, NARCS just get on with the job. And the job is rage. Fury. Angst. Anger. You know, all the stuff we seemed to have sanitised out of our music in favour of shifting units and toeing the industry line.

But that isn’t to say that they have one setting, far from it. A Thinking Animal is built on light and shade, dynamic and fluidity, it’s just that when they tone it down it is usually to take the music into dark, meandering places, quiet, nervous and edgy backwaters and when they go for it they rival the most pent up punk explosions.

Music doesn’t have to adhere to templates, if the advent of the post genre musical world taught us anything, that was surely its key message. Here NARCS explore that idea brilliantly mixing the drive of rock and the explosive emotion of punk, the wandering nature of post-rock, a bleak dystopian vision and an intense, politically aware lyrical onslaught.

At a time when the world seems to be spiralling down into a broken parody of itself and people are calling for change and even revolution, at least we know that the soundtrack is already written, now all we have to do is storm the barricades. - Dave Franklin