There’s something timely about LoneLady’s disquiet disco making a return just as the country is about to go to the polls. New album Hinterland goes to the logical conclusion of 2010’s masterfully bleak Nerve Up: it’s a concept album about a post-nuclear dystopia that sounds as if it could play through the rooms of the Hacienda.

On record, the songs of LoneLady (Julie Campbell) are built up from fragments: a Linn drum here, a spidery guitar riff there, with lyrics wafting through the air like mystery snippets of desperate conversations. But what can sound like the brittle rattle of a cassette machine playing in a deserted mall becomes thrilling in its live form, as if the exoskeleton is being filled in.

Tonight, bathed in projected images of end-of-the-pier lights and barbed-wire-topped brutalist buildings, she racks up the level of drama by several notches. It is something that is underlined by the brevity of the set (eight songs, no encore) and Campbell herself, who is a mix of spitting bite and cellophane-thin vulnerability, at times conjuring up the spirit of Lion-and-the-Cobra-era Sinead O’Connor.

There’s no fat in the svelte show, but highlights include Mortar Remembers You, a blustery bolt of Joy Division guitar terror and agoraphobic unease (“I had to build a room to contain all the panic,” goes the chorus) and the schizoid new wave of Early the Haste Comes, featuring a bass sound that resembles bombs going off. Nerve Up retains its ability to startle: it is a needle-thin sketch of a song whose spaces are filled with dramatic intrigue, sounding like the missing bassline to Kiss by Prince. Closer Hinterland, meanwhile, is a wonder: a sampled cello, a guitar solo straight out of Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and a semi-rapped part that sounds as if it could turn into Five Star’s System Addict at any moment.