Opus Kink make a pageant out of misery on The Sweet Goodbye

“Oh happy day, reasons for living / I have accepted the joke as it came,” he delivers with loose, nicotine-stained fatalism, while a self-described Ethio-jazz riff stabs from every direction in brass. Splashed across 6Music for good reason, the single announces that life is rotten, the joke is old and the band have turned up to celebrate.

If the album artwork suggests some drowned, miserable rite, musically there is no intention of observing it. The Sweet Goodbye imposes with a “let’s be having you” strut; Nick Cave’s soot-dark theatre abuts the communal, ska-laden frenzy of peers Fat Dog. Lyrically all black water and bad omens, the record is never in service to its symbolism. There is too much fun to be had, too much gaudiness to revel in, the boys forever intent on interrupting the solemnity.

“Will It Come For You?” embodies this ethos: repeated jibes that it is, indeed, coming for us are pursued by an ominous undercurrent of horns that evoke Bauhaus in silhouette but Madness in the knees. On “I’m a Pretty Showboy”, those same horns thicken into an ephemeral cacophony before dropping out to make way for a threatening bassline. Even the title track struggles to maintain its gothic composure. A cheeky indie number built around a call-and-response chorus, its bridge rises into a full-bellied chant suspended somewhere between Gregorian chant and sea shanty. The boys paint an overcast sky, then find fresh cause to revel beneath it.

“The Head Tree” continues the insouciant winks to camera. Alice Molland, hanged for witchcraft in 1685, is summoned from beneath an Aldi car park; the treatment is sizzling, electronic and indecently well placed. Brighton folk-punk outfit The New Eves sound almost Bushian in their warble, the hooks so insistent and clambering that you are left unsure whether you have been singing the chorus or the brass riff.

Nothing here is more musically exciting than the Pantone-coded “448C (The Colour of Love)”. A Phrygian passage tilts the listener before the song tears into a gallop, small flashes of electric organ biting at its heels. The bridge lowers into a guttural gang vocal evocative of throat singing, while the lead is pitched and filtered using treatments rarely heard outside the likes of Madonna’s American Life, never mind elbow-deep in Brightonian punk. It ends on a synth motif of the “Techno Syndrome”, Mortal Kombat variety. The entire sequence is absurd, so saturated with brilliant ideas that it ought to be consumed with a napkin over the head.

That appetite can be tricky to quell. “Crucify!” has everything required for triumph: brass in excelsis; moombahton-like syncopation deployed to similar effect as on Turnstile’s “DREAMING”, full-bodied and insistently alive. Yet its transitions dally. We are left swaying a little too long, waiting once again to make a toast in the ruins.

The debut full-length, eight years in the forge, is indulgent and occasionally becalmed by that very indulgence. More often, this excess supplies its singular charge. Opus Kink don't seek to defeat their contemporary gloom; they would rather heckle and outplay it, then shove it backwards into the baying crowd.