Retrospection shouldn’t have a place in the assessment of the here and now, but how can anyone listen to new A material without immediately referencing their past? ‘Summer On The Underground’, ‘Old Folks’, ‘Foghorn’: all great songs to lose yourself to on cheap booze and sugar snacks. Teen Dance Ordinance leads with its singles to date – the decent enough, Deftones-echoing ‘Rush Song’ and its frankly throwaway follow-up ‘Better Off With Him’ (that said, the second single sounds a lot better in an album context than it does as a standalone track) – but neither pack the necessary impact required to keep the listener’s attention through another ten tracks, many of which sound like a tinkered approximation of the openers.

‘Wake Up’ is a decently pop-rocking romp in the now-familiar Jane’s Addiction vein, but ‘Someone Else’ is simply dire: it’s as if Geddy Lee staggered unsteadily into the wrong rehearsal room following a dizzying Pin The Tail On The Donkey session and wound up singing through gritted teeth with a spotty teenage metal group. The crisp guitars clash nastily with Jason Perry’s very highest-pitched shrieks, the effect on the listener one of immediate action: skip to the next track. Fleeting highlights are relative – there are so many rotten apples here that the fresh fruit smells twice as sweet as it should.

The band’s forever-young exuberance remains even though they’ve now broken the 30 barrier – never do A sound like they’re not having a ball – but never does their enthusiasm rub off on ears bored to (sadly physically impossible) tears. It’s time to face a single, demoralising and quite depressing fact: A are a spent force.

Remember the good times – dancing and singing to songs full of youthful vitality and pop-punk hooks the size of tower blocks – and ignore this quasi-metal death rattle of rehashed riffs and redundant ideas.