The concept of journeys informs the debut album by the Dublin band Keeley: everything from “train journeys, ferry journeys, the journey of a long-standing murder investigation, and the journey my own life has gone on in relation to it over the past seven years”, according to frontwoman Keeley Moss.

Moss’s obsession with the unsolved murder of the German teenage backpacker Inga Maria Hauser, in 1988, has permeated much of her work, and although last year’s mini-album Drawn to the Flame was based around Hauser’s short life, her shadow looms large over these songs, too, particularly the title track (“We would have been friends / I’m convinced of that, if nothing else”), Never Here Always There, and You Never Made It That Far.

It’s a curious lyrical motivation for sure, but the music is by and large robust enough to carry it along. Moss’s love of 1980s and 1990s jangle and fuzz-pop (from the Smiths and Stone Roses to Lush and Ride) is audible on standout Seeing Everything and Arrive Alive, while The Glitter and the Glue and Forever’s Where You Are implant vim and bounce into the album’s prevailing pensive tone.

The thread unravels slightly when the track list slides into drippy reflection, as on Echo Everywhere, but a suitably squally, dreamlike cover of Spirtualized’s Shine a Light steadies the ship. It’s an unusual album but not one completely without its charms, either.