QUICK: name me an Irish band that isn’t U2.

Hard, isn’t it? It’s not that Ireland doesn’t have a rich and rewarding rock music history – oodles of excellent bands have tumbled forth from Eire – it’s just that Bono and his ageing chums cruelly overshadow almost every single one of them.

Thus, I’m pinning the Hopes Of A Nation on Policy, a brilliantly upbeat and stupendously charming band from Kilcoole.

Policy told me that they thought their favourute song was Pistachios, but I respectfully disagree – it’s actually the dizzyingly poised, endlessly delicate Suggestion Box:

I often wonder how a song as airy, seamless and fully-formed as this one comes about – they seem beamed in from elsewhere, the band merely a conduit. Perhaps that’s how it actually came together. Maybe we’ll never know. Maybe we never should.

Lovely, excellent, and wistful.  But if they’re going to challenge U2’s hegemony, the singer’s going to need some ‘trademark sunglasses’. Hey, I don’t write the rules.

MORE: policy.bandcamp.com