If you aren’t already familiar with Miss Vincent, you’ve been doing yourself a serious disservice. Better now than never though, because one of modern UK punk’s best-kept secrets are back at it again and their follow up to 2015’s horrendously underrated ‘Reasons Not To Sleep’ is their most focused, vibrant and exciting to date.

Where their earlier work was more focused on the fast, frenzied and frightening, ‘Somewhere Else’ is a lot more considered and an awful lot romance driven. The five songs that make up this sophomore effort are brimming with moments of burning passion and heartfelt emotion, while still maintaining a dark punk rock core.

The band have taken everything that made them so intriguing before, given things a lift and forged the audio equivalent of every love heart you scribbled in the back of your school textbooks. ‘Cold Hands’ channels Alkaline Trio at their most brilliant. ‘The Western Shore’ is built on a strong foundation of foot tapping beats and impassioned ‘woah-ohs’ and the slow dance cuteness of ‘Beauty In Darkness’ is the love letter that so many hopeless teenage romantics fail to pen. It all makes for an EP that is still fast enough to get the pit spinning but injected with enough deep-set loveliness to captivate the lovers among us too.

‘Somewhere Else’ is without a doubt the best that Miss Vincent have ever sounded. Enough hooks to last you all summer and an eye of the poetically romantic, the band have reeled in the creepy, upped the catchy and created a short sharp dose of blooming and affecting punk rock. If they can pull off this level of quality on a full-length we may be on the verge of something very special indeed.

4/5

‘Somewhere Else’ EP by Miss Vincent is released on 19th May on Uncle M.

Miss Vincent links: Facebook|Twitter

Words by Jack Rogers (@JackMRog)