Biffy Clyro Futique review: catchy, weird, often warm and occasionally crushingly sad, it's everything that makes Biffy one of the UK's greatest bands

The release of any new Biffy Clyro album is a cause for celebration – 23 years on from their debut, Blackened Sky, they remain the UK’s most consistently exciting, endlessly inventive and emotionally heavyweight rock band. But with Futique, that excitement and anticipation is twinned with relief at the fact it exists at all. Ahead of going in to record it, there was a crushing question mark over whether Biffy were going to continue. Luckily, their friendship was strong enough to see them through the rough patch, which, rather than tearing them apart, informed the mood and the themes explored on the record.

A sense of nostalgia is up front and centre in Futique – the title is a portmanteau of “future” and “antique”, the idea of cherishing a moment when it happens while recognising it as something that will later be remembered with fondness. It’s a concept that runs through the album lyrically, and in the warmth of the music, not least in opener A Little Love, an unashamed lighter-waver of an anthem that pays tribute to long-term friendship. A Thousand And One, meanwhile, is a heartfelt mea culpa set to a nonchalant groove and gentle melody.

Biffy have consistently avoided retreading their steps throughout their career, but the wonderful True Believer is a bridge between their roots and their future as they allow themselves to revisit those fabulously awkward, squawking prog-punk riffs of their earliest days alongside the lush musicianship that’s made them arena fillers in the present. It’s an instant classic.

Futique is an album of light and shade, ever-shifting textures, the comfortingly familiar and the startlingly fresh. The punk of Hunting Season gives way to the slinky, funky longing of Shot One. Dearest Amygdala explores the fight or flight, irrational part of the brain through the prism of jaunty, 80s-inflected pop rock, while Woe Is Me, Wow Is You is where the recording location of Berlin is heard most clearly.

Slightly off kilter and knowingly weird, it blossoms in the synth-based belter in which frontman Simon Neil once again acknowledges how much stronger friends and family are when they pull together. And the rawest moment on the record, Goodbye, is – in the best possible sense – a tough listen, a suicide note bathed in a dreamy, hazy ballad that leaves the listener feeling almost voyeuristic in its honesty.

Its arrival into the world may have been tricky, but Futique is the sound of a band still brimming with brand new ideas, still tugging on the heartstrings and still rocking like beasts after all these years. It’s having its moment right now, but when it’s old and familiar, Futique will surely continue to be treasured.