“I’m pretty unconvinced, but my girlfriend made us come so yeah…” The anonymous man standing stage left’s comment goes a long way in describing the type of crowd that’s packed out the iconic upstairs room of The Old Blue Last in Shoreditch tonight. Drowners’ debut album was only released last month but the band have been hyped up and brandished across Vogue and other ‘trendy’ fashion publications and blogs since 2012. There’s the vague possibility that this could be down to being fronted by a male model and having the fortune (or misfortune) of being associated with the New York ‘in crowd’ featuring the likes of Dev Hynes and Alexa Chung.

The imbalance of girls to boys means that the objectification in the room is palpable, with pleasant looking girls yelling out cat calls and requests to frontman Matt Hitt that would make their grandmothers blush. After setting up their own equipment, intermittently posing for photographs (those boys love the cameras) then disappearing, Drowners return to the stage to begin their just over half hour set twenty minutes late.

You don’t have to search far for Drowners’ influences, with every song bleeding Smiths’ jangly riffs and hoarding all the front of an unreleased Strokes record. In a way, Drowners have set themselves up for the smug, self-satisfied criticism and cries of unoriginality they’ve received in the dawn of their album. Nevertheless there’s no denying the bottom line that live – the songs sound pretty darn good. There isn’t the self-indulgence of over-performed, unnecessarily elongated songs or god-forbid – ‘jams’ that you can find at the other end of the spectrum, simply a band playing their self-confessed first ‘proper’ gig in London and giving everything they have into making it a good show.

With near enough every song being sub-three-minutes Drowners’ headlining slot is a case of blink and you’ll miss it. The front two rows of the crowd will testify from their frequent showerings of the band’s sweat that Drowners are indeed a band giving it their all and not just an it-girl’s latest commodity. ‘Unzip Your Harrington’ and ‘Shell Across The Tongue’ and their emphatic reception tonight demonstrates Drowners’ skill in making strong, uncomplicated punk-laced pop songs that are fun and even more animated live.

Are Drowners groundbreaking and innovative musicians? Probably not, but any criticism on those terms unfairly implies that they ever claimed to be. Their set comes to a close because they’ve ‘run out of songs’, but people would have happily stayed and been entertained by Drowners for far longer tonight.

Amy Davidson