Welly

Bouncing around like they've got spacehoppers strapped to their boots, these local art pop upstarts inject the right amount of snarled snark into their sizzling synth-fuelled takedown of suburbia - so go shopping, take a copy home this weekend, and soak up the culture: Cos this is gonna be big in the suburbs.

The album centres on the monochrome mundanity but also the unsung beauty of the suburbs; a collection of picture- perfect, alt- pop vignettes, in which regular lives are often quietly on the brink of going berserk. For his debut album - all written and self-produced by Welly himself - this rich tableaux of British life is celebrated for all its tragedies and triumphs.Here are songs about wanting more than you have, a world in flux, doomed romance, and figuring out how to be happy where everybody knows your name (and your Mum's).

Welly has been building his creative province all year with a series of singles in the run- up to 'Big In The Suburbs'. First single, 'Shopping', for instance, pays tribute to the dying UK high street and today's grass- is- greener mentality, setting out the group's blueprint for Pop on a budget. 'Soak Up The Culture' meanwhile both sends up and adds to the canon of the lost, the Lads- On- Tour Anthem, with lawnmower- themed love-triangle 'Deere John' connecting a story arc with 'Cul-De-Sac' (and the stasis of two people at a romantic dead-end road).

With inspiration ranging from the parochial storytelling of Blur or the intellectual electronica of Pet Shop Boys to kitchen- sink noughties bangers like Girls Aloud, Welly show early ambitions to reconnect the great, grassroots British tradition with the mainstream bands once beamed straight into your claustrophobic living room