They move in pairs, spreading out across the carriage; one, a male, slumps into the vacant seat beside me (his friend is left standing above me like some kind of emo sentry). He exhales loudly, eyes spinning in sockets sunk low, sweat glistening on his brow, once-neat hair now a mess of shoots and stalks. The females giggle excitedly, clutching posters torn from walls and darting looks at the males about them – slightly flirtatious, slightly critical, as if they’re rating each loose-trousered gent on the train. We lurch homeward, and a smell travels from air to nostrils, nostrils to brain: it’s what you’d so usually associate with a sexual epilogue, the serene, sticky calm that falls before any terrifying aftershocks. Yet all the stimulation these kids have received has been aural, courtesy of some popular rock band from Over There called Fall Out Boy.

It’s only now that I realise another band played this evening.

twentysixfeet can do this to a man, woman or child; they can wrap you up in their music – intoxicating, dizzying, spectacular in its execution and admirable in its scope – and keep you entirely isolated from ulterior forces for a set’s entirety. Theirs is a sound moulded around influences too diverse to list as points of reference; what rattles about a brain coated in candyfloss, before eyes blurred about the edges and desperate for the recovery of depth perception, is nothing short of wonderful. Epic, yet restrained, a near-perfect balance of cataclysmic force and the sort of subtleties that transform art into art. The sort worth giving a shit about, worth your investment, worth building a wave of excitement over before crashing the towering instrument of destruction into the nearest Three Little Pig village. They're the wolf, now build your bricks high.

They look like men who have no right standing beside each other: IT consultants and Caribbean pirates, space cowboys and Route 66 truckers, greengrocers and butchers. They’re the snail porridge of today’s London music scene: to the mind of the many it doesn’t work, but the few that actually get to taste the wares in question are left in no doubt of their qualities. This is music of succulence and depth, of exquisite taste that belies the selection of venues within which twentysixfeet so regularly ply their trade. At its very best, this set is a museum piece, designed for surrounding so salubrious that to spill a pint would be like scratching your nails into the Mona Lisa.

And stop. The laughing gnomes get off, leaving behind only snail-like scent trails, so heavy in the air they’re practically tangible. I follow, and my phone bleeps into life: “65days were amazing tonight.”

I’m reminded, again, that another band played this evening. Couldn’t. Care. Less.