NewDad open their second album Altar with a deceptively innocent little music-box. Julie Dawson’s feather-light vocals sit on top, and when the band crashes in at the two-minute mark the contrast is startling dissolving from brightness into a dark and enveloping slow dirge with a trudging and forlorn heaviness. Even when NewDad sound delicate, there’s tremendous weight underneath.

Altar sits in a space between softness and power. Heavyweight is an early highlight with shades of Garbage built on a thick, grungy bassline and guitars with carefully-measured reverb. The attention to detail in the production expands the emotional range, with synths glittering and stretching the music out wider, making even the gentlest tracks feel big enough for a festival field. The faster and more propulsive moments pull from the classic rainy-day atmospherics of The Smiths with hints of a lonely, grey atmosphere with something distinctly 80s in the way the band uses keyboards to open up the choruses. You get flashes of New Order and Tears For Fears in the combination of melancholy and widescreen pop ambition, with ballads not as filler, but as the genuinely reflective and hugely emotional core of the album. Puzzle is a great example of how much NewDad can do with tone alone, the whole song glowing softly at the edges like a ballroom chandelier. Everything I Wanted is the emotional centrepiece with a devastating chorus featuring a beautiful bassline moving in counterpoint to the vocal which demonstrates how clearly composed this album is, with every element listening to everything else. The closer Something’s Broken holds a kind of skipping, rainy-day pavement energy which is bright on the surface but lonely underneath. Altar is nostalgic and intimate without being small. In fact, it’s enormous when it wants to be. Shimmering, enveloping, and beautifully sad.