First Class & Coach: Neon Hip – West Cork’s best-kept musical secret unleash a fine second album

There is something of a best-kept secret about this west Cork band. The four-piece, formed in 2017, released their debut album, The Truth about Honey, to little fanfare in 2020 yet gained numerous supporters in high places, including radio DJs in Ireland and Britain who scrambled to declare their genius.

It turns out that there was something to those commendations. The band’s second album, “a testament to loss and grief”, is not a particularly musically groundbreaking affair, although if mid-2000s New York bands such as Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs are your thing, songs such as My Oh My will tick every box.

That’s not to damn First Class & Coach with faint praise; this is a hugely enjoyable record, particularly with Geraldine Thomas’s charismatic, pliable yelp at the forefront of songs such as 100 Miles and Sure, tracks that whirl between 1980s postpunk and chugging Queens of the Stone Age-style riffs.

Delete’s satisfyingly grimy bassline is a thrill ride, but although Thomas treads the line between Nico and Karen O on the ghostly, nihilistic murmur of No Tomorrow, it is clear that the band are at their best when revelling in the more strident, squally songs.

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True, their lyrics are a little undeveloped in places (“Your hands in my hair, press delete / My mind full of fear, press delete”), but there is an undeniable charm to this rough-around-the-edges record, nonetheless.