Against everything that your ears might tell you, Wild Smiles started making music in Hampshire. In a garden shed in Hampshire, to be precise – not, as their beach-spun sound might suggest, on a wooden jetty in Orange County, California.

The story of the band’s debut album, Always Tomorrow, reads in a similar, if parallel, way to Justin Vernon’s now hugely celebrated formation of Bon Iver: man has band; band breaks down; man has girlfriend; relationship breaks down; man seeks way out in music whilst broke and alone. That’s where the parallels end. This is a far cry from haunting falsetto folk. This is beach-bound guitar rock, cut with a jagged serrated knife. It’s pop-punk, blues-root, green-fingered… greatness. We have enough ellipses in society to fill the universal void with another bloody void, starting with the gap they leave before announcing who’s going out this week in (INSERT REALITY TV SHOW OF CHOICE HERE), but my own use of this extraordinarily annoying piece of punctuation is in reference to the great surprise it is to learn that these guys are, really, very good.

It doesn’t take more than a few seconds to spot the influences: The Beach Boys, Velvet Underground, maybe a little Ramones for good measure. It’s actually hard to tell if any of the main chord progressions are just direct rips in certain cases, but it’s actually not the point: Wild Smiles have made a record worth listening to for the same reason The Beach Boys are more than a bubble-gum fad. They take dark, ironic or comical lyrics and put them over ecstatically happy override guitar tones, so you always get a sense of depth and deception.

Opening track, ‘Fool For You’ is more of a statement of style than a predominant force on the album, but succeeding ‘Never Wanted This’ plays out as one of the defining reasons why Wild Smiles have the potential to make a proper impact in the music scene. Essentially a rebellion against quiet suburban life, it is reminiscent of Talking Heads’ ‘The Big Country’ in theme and The Ramones’ ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ in its chorus progression. The mix works. It sounds like a band from another era, except, where in previous decades this simple three-piece may have been another shouty voice in an already saturated market, there’s enough of a difference here to mark them out. Just.

There are times when Always Tomorrow seeps into a wash of sound that starts to bounce around the inner ears in a slightly-too repetitive manner. ‘Figure It Out’ and ‘Girlfriend’ are examples of this, but otherwise perfectly valid and quite funny songs in their own right. But it’s important not to be swept away by the tidal wave of noise that the band deliberately wields to their advantage. The writing is more intelligent and thought-out than the glitzy commercialism of a straight-pop act in hiding, and if you want evidence for that, have a listen to how they deal with a topic like suicide in the aptly-named ‘Hold On’. No ballads here, thankyouverymuch: just straight-talking rock at 200 beats-per-minute. And in the current climate, that’s actually very refreshing.

Pete Cary

@PeterCary1