The best new band of 2018, ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER elevate and accelerate multi-guitar jangle rock to new levels. At home in Melbourne, ANDREW PERRY taps into their infectious groupthink. “We share,” they say, “one brain between us.”

DRIVING FROM MELBOURNE, you reach the port city of Geelong by following the M1 south-west around the Port Phillip Bay for 50 miles, until you reach the Bellarine peninsula. In late-afternoon spring sunshine, it looks idyllic enough, with its deserted beachside promenade and swanky marina. “But it’s also got a Ford factory, a Toyota plant and a Shell refinery – so they call it Gee-troit,” beams Fran Keaney, one of three singing-guitarists in Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, an electrifying Melbourne band who’ve been ordained MOJO’s best new band of 2018. Following an ecstatic response to their debut album, Hope Downs, the late-twentysomethings are back playing at home after touring the globe. The shift from glamorous festivals like Coachella and Primavera Sound to the 300-capacity Workers Club here in Geelong definitely qualifies as a reality check – the local blue-collar workforce can be a tough crowd, intolerant of hipster bullshit. Nerves are in scant evidence, though, as the quintet chow down on fish and chips in their tiny dressing room. Thus fuelled, they generate an excitement which quickly dispels any potential hostility. Like a supercharged Go-Betweens, their music is driven by a propulsive rhythm section and that tightly-woven three-guitar assault. Tingling lead lines trowel extra soaring hooks onto already hyper-melodic songs. And as the three frontmen – electric warriors Tom Russo and Joe White, and acoustic-rattler Keaney – each step up to the mike to deliver evocative stanzas in semi-spoken Aussie drawls, often all within the same song, they present a group identity, a unity of purpose, which stuns the Workers Club. Dressed down in jeans, plaid and faded T-shirts, Rolling Blackouts eschew any airs and graces, and Hope Downs itself zeroes in on how individual lives have been shattered amid the political chaos of the past few years. In one of its key songs, Bellarine, a hard-up divorcé, most likely laidoff from a zero-hours industrial contract up the road, drinks away his life’s tragedy (“Two years since I’ve seen my daughter”). Perhaps that’s him slumped over at the far end of the bar, while ever yone else bellows along to flamehaired White’s anthemic chorus, “My Bellarine, from here I shoot my scene…I never did my best.” In Britain, we may view them as daftly-christened arrivistes from a fertile new Melbourne uprising which has already brought us King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Courtney Barnett. Yet, while certainly benefitting from their home city’s community-minded musical approach, their story is more of a family affair; their unity born of two brothers, a pair of cousins and a sometime housemate chipping away at songcraft in private, over an evolutionary period of some 13 years. “We all try and fit in with the voice of the group,” explains the thoughtful Tom Russo,