Club Smith @ The Camden Barfly, London

If you’ve been paying close attention to this site over the past couple of months – and thank you if you have - you’ll have noticed the words ‘Club’ and ‘Smith’ cropping up rather frequently.

Aside from anything else, this is because we’ve found ourselves incredibly taken by everything we’ve received from them: the singles, the amusing videos, the sneaky album samplers – all of it. Until Monday, the only remaining question mark was whether the band could live up to this early promise and deliver a live set that matched expectations.

We needn’t have worried.

In set opener, ‘Young Defeatists’, Club Smith have a song that sets the benchmark against which all other unsigned guitar bands ought to be measured. Loud, powerful and executed with pinpoint precision, it established the tone for a well-paced set that worked up to a frantic bass-driven apex (‘Nonchalant’), before jack-knifing back towards the beautifully subdued ‘Lament’.

Closing with the ferocious ‘No Friend Of Mine’, it hit home that Club Smith are simply too damn good to remain unsigned for much longer. They’re a band on the rise, and if they can keep turning in performances like this you’ll be hearing a lot more from them in the near future.