It's all awards nominations and lady admirers round the Thrills' place these days, so who can blame them for shedding the melancholia that made America succumb? Their autumnal introspection lost along with their inhibitions, the Dublin fivepiece landed at Brixton with the words: "Hey, hey, we're the fucking Thrills!"

They still have one of the least apt names in pop; the "thrills" on offer amounting to strummy country-rock, adeptly played. Heading an NME-sponsored night of new guitar groups, they looked ready to take Travis's place as the Celtic mildmen who turned up just as the public rediscovered an appetite for tuneful understatement. Compared with the supporting 22-20s, whose brute blues drove many of the crowd into the bar, the Thrills' set was a leaf out of the A&R man's textbook: a shortish, pacy show packed with hits from the platinum So Much for the City album. The unwelcome phrase, "This next one's a new one" only popped up once, and so diffidently that tall, bendy Conor Deasy might have been apologising for interrupting the flow.

Their technique honed by, he said, "playing to 400 cowboys in Nashville," they enlarged the nostalgic Santa Cruz and Big Sur to arena-singalong size. It probably will be arenas next time around, and when they get there, they'll have the quintessential lighter-waver ready to go in It's a Shame When Old Friends Fall Out. Its sobbing chorus was the anthemic highlight at Brixton, inducing groups of lads to sway tremulously, New Year's Eve style. If ever there was a Danny Boy for the text generation, this was it, and if they wanted a memory-nudge in the direction of 80s teen idols, Whatever Happened to Corey Haim? provided it. So, finally, the answer to why Thrills tickets are snapped up as soon as they go on sale: they recreate, in a wholly likeable way, the era of bar-room singsongs - though not, sadly, that era's bar prices.