Seattle’s La Luz may be a first-rate party band, but what makes them so intriguing is the dark undertow to their short, sharp, minor-chord heavy jams. Their lyrical fascination with death was not dispelled at all between the making of their 2013 debut album It’s Alive and their Ty Segall-produced latest set Weirdo Shrine, thanks to a terrifying tour van crash that destroyed all their gear and very nearly killed them.

It certainly gives their songs an edge. If Don’t Wanna Be Anywhere or You Disappear are surf music, they’re surf music that’s just fallen off its board, remembered it can’t swim and spotted a shark fin fast approaching.

You could listen to vocalist and guitarist Shana Cleveland’s whammy-bar wobbling, reverb-encrusted surf-noir Stratocaster solos all night long, likewise the intuitively fluent playing of bassist Lena Simon, drummer Marian Li Pino and organist Alice Sandahl. As for their four-part doom-wop harmonies? Let La Luz sing your alarm ringtone every 6am morning for a month and they’d probably still have you starting the day in a state of mellow bliss.

Songs like What Good Am I? (“sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind / crawlin’ off into the woods to die”) played by a chipper foursome who at one point part the crowd for a Soul Train-style dance line – the jive-happy Sandahl jumping down to show everyone how it works – make for a hilariously odd contradiction. Li Pino going crowd-surfing during Sure as Spring while getting an audience member to fill in for her behind the drum kit – amusingly ably as it turns out – is belly-laughing stuff. A few minutes later, having stuffed nearly 20 songs into less than an hour, they’re encoring with a Link Wray-indebted lovesick dirge called You Can Never Know in which Cleveland sings of bashing out her teeth, losing her mind and slipping over to the other side. If hell’s this much fun, who can wait?