>If you’re like me (and if you are, please accept my immediate condolences), at any one given time, you’ll cite one particular band as the Nadir of Rock Crappiness. The band will change – at the moment mine is Scouting For Girls, but The Kooks, Kula Shaker and Ocean Colour Scene have all sprung quickly to mind when searching for an example of awful music.

In the past, Shed Seven also fulfilled the wispy criteria for inclusion. Their name was clunky, their songs were mindless and/or overwrought and/or lightweight, they were from York, and they were unfathomably popular, in the UK at least.

Last night a friend took umbrage at this opinion. “They’re great live!” he panted. “They wrote some classic tunes!” he bridled.

He put on their dreadfully-named album A Maximum High, and… oh, crap. He was half-right. Some of the songs were OK. Some were enjoyable. Some made me long for lager, Ben Sherman shirts and Oasis albums playing in the pub.

So my judgement was wrong. Bah. But do trust me when I say that Today’s New Band, Semya, are an insidious, blinding flash of sonic creativity and focus.

Drumsandlilypads floats on its own warmth; light and airy, multi-faceted and complex. The sounds peak and fall, recycling and crumbling into themselves over and over. Tectonics shifts noisily, disturbing all around it, chewing up tasty sounds and leaving behind the remains in the fashion it sees fit.

Earth Ghost, the musical equivalent of finding a shadowy anomaly in a photograph of a loved one, is compiled from a scattering of sounds that oughtn’t make sense together. This song is the spot where they all overlap and work, like a sonic Venn diagram.

Lessons learnt: apologies to Shed Seven, and congratulations to Semya, whose music is organically un-structured almost to the point of tactility. Super. Listen here!