The Gurge is back.

Although most people in the UK outside of Shepherd’s Bush don’t know them from Adam, back in 1997 their cheerfully subversive second album Unit elevated the Brisbane quartet to the heights of Australian alt-rock alongside the likes of Eskimo Joe and Spiderbait.

It’s a sad irony then that their sixth album Love and Paranoia seems to embody the titular statement of the opening track of that stellar effort, ‘I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff’. It’s not that they’ve lost any of their flair for the controversial, opening with the subtly-titled ‘Blood and Spunk’, or that their tongues aren’t still firmly embedded in the higher recesses of their cheeks.

The visceral commentary on middle-class corporate culture is still there too, but the playful sense of the absurd that made Unit so much fun seems to have evaporated in the intervening years, manifesting at the extreme as an almost apocalyptic death wish. Still astringent but the mojo’s gone.