The post-post-punk scene – or the New Wave of British Post Punk – or whatever the hell you want to call it has entered its difficult second phase. The debut albums that framed the movement are all about three years in the past now. Black Country, New Road went from being the world’s second best Slint tribute act to injecting Arcade Fire into their veins, losing their frontman, and doubling down on the Arcade Fire. Squid went from chaotic and thrashy to moody and textured. Black Midi straight up broke up after making some of the best noise prog of all time. Now there are bands who want to deliver their own spins on the genre – look at Yard Act, now on their second record, their first having been an act of NWBPP worship and their second looking at where to move from there.

Three years is about right, if you make an analogy with grunge in the early 90s. You had, beginning with Alice In Chains’ Facelift, a period between 1990 and 1991 where the Big Four released powerful, world-shaking records that marked out a movement. By 1994 the initial excitement was over. There were bands like Bush that were riding the sound’s wave to the radio; there were bands like Stone Temple Pilots who, after basically aping Pearl Jam on their debut, added elements of psych and jazz to create something interesting. While the South London post-post movement doesn’t have a wide niche carved out on radio like grunge did, it’s a similar pattern. Enter Honeyglaze, who are taking the STP approach to their framework sound.

Real Deal shows a band that uses post-post-punk as scaffolding. They aren’t married to the sound, but they do use the best parts of it to great effect. Anouska Sokolow delivers her lines in a vicious mixture of Isaac Wood and Geordie Greep. Behind her, though, the band touches on the orchestral desperation of BC,NR and the sudden violence of Black Midi but ultimately settles on neither. Instead, the moody, complicated figures that fill in the details of the songs owe a great deal more to math rock like Pinback and American Football. It is an admission of the genre’s influence on others that making the guitars sound like Pinback doesn’t set them completely apart from their contemporaries. It sounds, a lot of the time, like that’s how it was always supposed to be.

It’s a step beyond their debut and it shows a willingness to experiment, which marks them out as a band to watch. Of course, ‘willingness to experiment’ is baked into the scene, so take that with a grain of salt – it’s just something people say when a band goes from Core to Purple. Honeyglaze are moving, though, they are progressing, travelling, going somewhere, even if none of us can really say where the destination might be. Still festooned with the ribbons of where they’ve been, naturally, but the way those ribbons ripple in the wind of their journey is as enticing as anything else.