Most of punk’s sonic hallmarks calcified into cliche long ago, but if there’s one trope still able to induce the shock of the old, it’s the dissonant, direct, stubbornly wonky female vocals that animate the work of the Slits, the Raincoats and X-Ray Spex. On Manchester trio Virginia Wing’s fourth album, frontwoman Alice Merida Richards evokes their thrillingly relatable voices with her own – a jerky, unmediated sprechgesang that combines vacant disaffection with rumbling rage.

Like those 1970s trailblazers, Virginia Wing are primarily concerned with questions of identity – but instead of simply wrestling with endemic misogyny and the deadening effects of consumer capitalism, the millennial woman must also contend with social media and how it renders selfhood a slippery, subjective thing. “I’m used to painting a watercolour version of myself,” mutters Merida Richards over new age chimes; “I tried to behave the way I want to be described,” she admits over layers of pillowy synths; “My tastes have changed to accommodate,” she explains over piston percussion.

However pertinent, it’s a theme that could have easily left Private Life a frosty and depressing record. Thankfully, as their similarly excellent last album Ecstatic Arrow proved, Virginia Wing are experts at offsetting emotional ambivalence with surprising, eclectic, rich, meandering and idiosyncratic sounds: Private Life teems with earwormy hooks and bright, gleaming melodies, ambling rhythms, warm, conversational sax, ambient synths and pointillist beats. Nodding to dubby post-punk, dream-pop, rave and disco, its experiments are half-familiar yet never ostensibly retro – an approach that tempers this exploration of a very modern malaise with a dose of nostalgic comfort and joy.