Things don’t begin well for Real Lies. Backed by a video of a strobing motorway, frontman Kev Kharas po-facedly dedicates the band’s first track to the “straight-through crew”, before launching into Blackmarket Blues, opener of their album Real Life. On record, it’s Pacific State overlaid with a blokeishly sentimental spoken-word eulogy to nights so late they’re days; tonight, it’s somehow transformed into the worst kind of droning, furrow-browed XFM indie. Deeper, the band’s usually coldly shimmering debut single, gets the same treatment.

Then, just like that, it all goes north. To the Hacienda, specifically, as the London trio – a five-piece live – bring “newest member” Celeste on stage. She sings the Bassomatic sample on One Club Town, another of Real Lies’ odes to nightlife, as the band back her house vocal with joyously atonal reggae. It’s a jolt of euphoria that they manage to sustain even after Celeste has taken her leave – into the slow, faintly dub-like sirening of Dab Housing and through to Seven Sisters, a synthpop reimagining of Vogue.

While the band’s debut album sees them envelop, sinkhole-style, everything that is evocative about rapturously melancholic, streetlamp-lit British pop, it’s also a record concerned with refashioning misty-eyed masculinity for this disconcerting “decade with no name”, as Seven Sisters neatly dubs it. For Real Lies, going out is both transcendent and noble, but so is coming home to scrappy suburbia, its “men who drink in A-road pubs / and rave flyers / all lost in the same sea” rendered in impressionistic detail by North Circular. The latter is Real Lies’ true anthem, and proves they can match exultation with eloquence.

The band finish with World Peace, a song that the laws of probability suggest New Order must have recorded at some point – and one they might have been proud to at that. Yes, Real Lies are inescapably derivative, but when the regurgitated past scrubs up this well, who honestly cares?