On the face of it, whichever fiendish record company laboratory created the emo movement were on to a good thing. Combining the raucous if slightly goofball guitars of Green Day with the emotional hard centre of Radiohead should have led to unassailable global sales, but for some reason the movement hasn't quite caught on. Perhaps the boffins didn't consider that it's not always possible to pogo and hurl pints of cider while undergoing some sort of existential crisis. Long Island's Brand New, however, would beg to disagree. In the US, they were nominated Rolling Stone's "hot band" of 2003 and their Deja Entendu album has shipped 300,000 copies. Over here, heavy rotation on MTV has led to small but packed out houses. When singer Jesse Lacey sings, "I hope this songs starts a craze", he needn't worry. Three songs in, he's praising "the best ever crowd we've played to". Their UK prospects can't be harmed by the fact that their audience know and sing along with every word.

Cider and hair do indeed fly around - to songs about identity crises, unspecified traumas, relatives' cancer diagnoses and men with tattoos who are rude about the Smiths. Perhaps surprisingly, Lacey is a Morrissey obsessive, and the hand of Moz is all over titles like I Wrote More Postcards Than Hooks. Lacey can fire off above-averagely emotionally-charged punky anthems in his sleep (and probably does) but there's a more significant artist lurking under a pulled-down beanie hat he already looks too old for. When he praises British crowds for "Drinking more than anybody else" he's quick to add: "Not that that's at all clever." More notably, three slower-paced songs suggest a Cure/REM/U2-style anthemic transcendence is not beyond them. The goofball emo may be bringing home the paydirt for now, but when the dust and cider settle, we might see what they're really made of.

· At Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth, tonight. Box office: 023-9286 3911. Then touring.