The primary malaise of the 21st century, according to the Irish band Gurriers on their much-anticipated debut album, is the way continuous interaction with the “digital realm” has gradually stripped away a sense of reality. There was enough reality for the group’s founders, Dan Hoff and Mark McCormack, in pre-Covid days when they worked together in a 24-hour fast-food outlet. Back then they dreamed about starting a band, which they went on to do in January 2020. One lengthy pandemic and 18 months later, Gurriers’ debut gig, at The Workmans Club in Dublin, set them off on a trajectory that hasn’t stopped climbing.

Come and See will only add to the justified ruckus that Gurriers have been causing: the album is stuffed with the kind of roughage and riffage that fans of their fellow Irish bands Sprints, The Murder Capital, Gilla Band and Fontaines DC have been experiencing for some years. Those influences are sensed perhaps too often across the album, but there is little to be concerned about given how far Gurriers’ material has developed in the past two years: Come and See is clearly a work in progress from a band almost falling over itself with ideas.

A distinct bonus is how sociopolitically aware the songs are. Nausea focuses on the impossibility for online content moderators to unsee things (“They drink with friends to pass the time, but it won’t go, it won’t go away”). Approachable, written in the character of a far-right online provocateur, looks at how easy it is to sell fake news and social turmoil to the gullible and misinformed (“Let’s unite to create division, it starts on screens and ends on streets ... The truth is hard to come by with the millions of clicks and the dopamine fix”). Prayers, meanwhile, blends spoken word, boot-stomping music and an update on PiL’s Religion in its depiction of a failing Catholic Church (“Now the pope says his prayers to those empty rows of chairs”).

All told, job done. More work to do, of course, but this debut agitates in all the right ways.