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Modern Excuse Of A Man? You’ve Got A Bad Case Of The Religions? Funeral For A Friend certainly know how to write a song title. Screamo-phobes might argue that it’s the songs themselves that need work, but long-time fans are unlikely to be complaining.

That’s because FFAF continue to plough the more uncompromising, full-throttle furrow they’ve returned to since their major-label flirtations with stadium rock in the mid-noughties.

Matthew Davies-Kreye’s vocals sound impressively close to mental breakdown, while the lurching riffage underpinning You Should Be Ashamed Of Yourself and the rabble-rousing roar of Pencil Pusher are similarly startling.

The only drawback? It sounds like just another FFAF album. Even the stripped-back treatment of Brother is evidently a generic FFAF song played on acoustic. Then again, they long ago proved their versatility, and there’s no shame in sticking to home territory./o:p

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.