Radio Free Alice have spent the last couple of years being described as a band on the verge of something, and What’s In Between is the record that finally lets them step through the door. The Australian four-piece’s debut album, out today on Atlantic, is eleven tracks and thirty-nine minutes of wry, restless, gloriously self-aware guitar pop — the sound of a band who grew up on British indie and decided to write their own coming-of-age story in its margins.

It opens with “Crying With You,” and what an opening it is. The song tinkers experimentally for a few seconds — a creaking gate, water droplets, the sound of a world being entered — before Lochie Dowd’s drums crash in and Noah Learmonth’s vocal takes over, half-shouted, fully committed. Learmonth spent his first ten years in the UK before his family moved to Australia, and you can hear that split identity in every line: the accent, the references, the sense of being an outsider in two places at once. “I’ve been fashionable for exactly five minutes,” he yells in the bridge, and it’s the kind of line that tells you everything about this band’s humour — sharp, self-lacerating, and completely unbothered about whether you get the joke.

The rest of the record keeps that tension wound tight. “Rule 31” rattles along like a train on a track, Paradiso’s guitar and Philips’ bass building a thrilling undercurrent of tension beneath Learmonth’s vocal. “Kick in the Shins” powers forward on pure frustration, the lyricist pouring individual grievance into a chorus built to be shouted back. “Bottleshops” sends up directionless young men — work as the enemy, sales and company cards met with sneering derision — while “Undressed” watches heartache from the outside, gentle and devastating in equal measure. And then there’s “Big Ideas,” featuring Rachel Brown of Water From Your Eyes, the album’s most understated turn, a song the band admit took them somewhere they hadn’t been before.

What makes What’s In Between work is that it never coasts on its influences. Yes, you can hear The Smiths and Pulp in the storytelling, The Killers — with whom the band toured last year — in the widescreen ambition, and producer Peter Katis’ fingerprints all over the clean, expansive sound. But Learmonth’s writing is its own thing: whip-smart, class-conscious, funny in a way that lands as a scoff rather than a laugh, and serious about ambition in a way that would sound cringe in lesser hands. Clash gave it 9/10 and called it breathtaking, and for once the adjective doesn’t feel inflated.

The album closes with “Waiting,” a contemplative, half-spoken track that lets the air out slowly after all that forward motion. It’s a quiet ending for a loud record, and it suits a band who have always understood that the space between things — between countries, between youth and whatever comes next, between the joke and the feeling underneath it — is where the best songs live. Radio Free Alice aren’t the next big thing anymore. They’re here.

Rating: 4.7/5

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