Robocobra Quartet aren’t a quartet: they’re a punky new wave sextet from Belfast mixing up twitchy grooves, crunchy rock drums, alternately punchy or languorous bass guitars and skronking saxophones, with the dryly laconic voice of Chris Ryan reciting wry commentaries and fragments of texts over the top. There are parallels to be drawn with the similarly sombre and guitarless Morphine, with the acerbically outré indie rock of The Fall, the lugubrious proggyness of Slint or Tortoise, and with the kind of arty, quirky experimentalism of bands like Rip Rig And Panic - a tradition that flourished in the 1980s and has seen a resurgence in some of the post-Brexit-y post-punky, sprach-gesang centered bands loosely associated with the label Speedy Wunderground, like Squid and Black Country New Road. The performances have an attractively raw, nervous energy, laced with a typically Belfast caustic wit: ‘Heaven’ presents an organised tumult of heavy-rock riffage, with Ryan calling out some disturbing thoughts on the subject of childbirth, like a desolate David Byrne, to monumental effect: ‘Micro Person’ develops the same theme over an ominously brooding indie-prog workout: ‘Plant’ brings a truly disturbing Fugazi heaviness to a comic story about a houseplant that turns into a meditation on death: by the time we get to the mournful, elegaic closer ‘Night’ Ryan sounds exhausted and so are we. ‘Chromo Sud’ gives the band’s free-jazzy leanings full rein in a 13-minute epic, with Ryan’s affectless drawl of “We’re through the worst of it now” providing an unforgettable moment of existential anguish. Best of all is ‘Wellness’, where he reads out, verbatim, a selection of wellness influencers’ accounts of their grotesque daily routines, over a manically upbeat funk: bleak and hilarious at the same time. A compelling soundtrack for where we are today.