Still Here is an adult emo album, carrying the real weight of divorce and the grief of memories that didn’t turn into the lives they were meant to be. Where teenage emo magnifies arrested adolescent feelings, this album aches with devastation and huge communal choruses that are more about survival than the performance. Representing a lineage of UK emo and pop-punk that has always been more about catharsis than polish, Brutalligators trade in raw DIY honesty over studio perfection.

The album is under 40 minutes, but the emotional arc is exhausting, heavy with regret, resilience and stubborn survival as Luke’s Australian accent adds tremendous warmth and character to an otherwise very British 2000 Trees emotional framework. Still Here sets the tone immediately with huge, defiant gang vocals, and Get Better follows with a soaring chorus designed for a full room to scream it back together. Throughout the record there’s an overwhelming sense of camaraderie in the performances, sounding like the band are holding one another up. The slower songs are devastating, with Hold Fast a standout that opens gently and builds towards an anguished climax. The song is about remaining in a home that was bought for two, now occupied by one, and Luke’s screams feel necessary rather than theatrical. The fast songs are phenomenally catchy, with Train Wreck embracing messiness and uncertainty with joyful defiance. What’s Next swings into colossal pop-punk territory, and Can’t Sleep is a perfect emo song capturing insomnia, as the blunt simplicity of the words ‘Can’t Sleep’ hits so hard; we all know the feeling. Millenial anxiety is threaded through all these songs, the sense of lives not coming together and everything going wrong despite the best efforts, all handled with humour and solidarity instead of self-pity, and the slower moments evoke Frank Turner in the stubborn insistence on continuing on with emo for the right reasons.