Helen Walkinshaw is not concerned with hitting the right notes. She’s concerned with telling you what’s annoyed her at full volume in a Geordie accent thick and proud. With her northeast accent as front and centre as Amy Taylor’s Australian dialect is in Amyl and the Sniffers, IRKED’s regional voice is as non-negotiable a part of the music as the guitar and the drums.

IRKED are from Tyne and Wear, and their debut album The Grievance is putting the northeast of England on the punk map in the best way with a rock and roll racket that sounds like it was built to soundtrack a skateboarding bails compilation. The backing music is fast and unapologetic and Helen’s feral scream is extremely reminiscent of Poly Styrene with a complete disregard for polish. The album opens with I.R.K.E.D.F.U. spending its entire two and a half minutes revving up before Repeat Offender kicks in with Helen embodying the spirit of a petulant teenager who’s fed up with everything. Running is a fifty two second portrait of a Lycra-clad dickhead who speeds past you because they need to post their route to social media, pointing the finger at an extremely specific target, and The ACP is an explicit rejection of middle class gawpers in cherished DIY spaces. Settle Down captures the energy of the teenage punk bands of the seventies alongside the bratty refusal to grow up that ran through NoFX and Guttermouth. Green Space is about keeping kids off the perfectly tended grass because adults are more important, and Death Cult takes on the pressure to constantly grind and hustle. Freak Pub demonstrates that Helen can actually carry a tune when she chooses to, and even features a saxophone that seems to be directly quoting X-Ray Spex. At almost forty minutes, this is a generous record since most punk releases of this style would be done and dusted in twenty minutes, and Helen’s voice is as entertaining as the best stand-up comedy, fully committed to having a good old scream.