‘What is your five-year plan? Who is your mortgage advisory man? Please tell me more about the school catchment area in your new neighbourhood?’ (Settle Down)

To be irked feels like a most quintessentially English emotion.  To be repeatedly agitated by something, but to be too polite to say anything, until you finally erupt in what, to the unaware, may seem like a disproportionate display of anger.

Now, Tyne & Wear’s Irked are most definitely angry but, thankfully, far too impolite to keep it to themselves. So, we are treated to another whiplash tour of darkly acerbic observation and blackly wry humour on their aptly titled debut full-length, The Grievance.

All the hallmarks of the band’s self-titled debut EP are firmly in pace, though they pulse with a more febrile abrasiveness amid the catchy hooks and contemptuous fury.  The tautly clean guitars unfurl waves of riffage that jerk and jolt with a sinewy vigour that matches the propulsive garage punk energy of the rhythm section.

This provides the perfect primer for the utterly virtuoso vocals.  Sardonic drawls morph into urgent yelps and then into venomous tirades with a bristling yet seamless intensity as they cast their eye over themes of cultural gentrification, midlife malaise, and the workplace treadmill.

There are highlights aplenty to get stuck into.  The fiercely rhythmic exhortations of Who Asked?  The ominously roiling The ACP.  The spiralling indignation of Settle Down.  The gyrating venom of The Hardest Man In Billingham. The sax fuelled contortions of Freak Pub.  Each slams home with a bracing, invigorating slap.