Calling your band ‘Girls’ suggests someone seeking anonymity (try putting that name in Google). Given the singer/lyricist escaped from a childhood spent with hippy cult The Children of God, this is quite believable. Along with calling your debut record ‘Album,’ suggests that the San Francisco duo of Christopher Owens and JR White may assume they are churning out generic product. The latter is certainly not the case. "Album" is an indie-slacker take on heartbreak and redemption, sound-tracked by a rummage-sale rifling of American music from the last four decades. If at first listen it doesn’t grab your attention, repeated listens slowly pull you in to its woozy, adolescence-come-undone, sour-sweet world.

’Lust For Life’ (no, not that one) is an upbeat guitars-and-hand claps power-pop nugget to open the album. It hymns sunshine and pizza but is undercut with a deep sense of longing and hope; “maybe I could make a brand new start / in love with you.” 'Summertime' is again a West Coast paean to soaking up the sunshine and getting high. But a tense rhythm track and Owens’ sandpaper-croak vocals at their most cracked suggests something darker going on. Memories of a happier, adolescent time that may never return - if it even existed?

If there are cheerier moments musically (the AM radio high school love-song stomp of ‘Laura,’ the plush velvet croon and twanging guitar of ‘Headache,’ the shoegaze-on-uppers guitar rush of ‘Morning Light,’) there are also the come down songs. At the center of the album is the king of all these, the six and a half minute ‘Hellhole Rat Race’ - “I’m sick and tired of the way that I feel / I’m always dreaming and it’s never for real / I’m all alone … with my heartache, with my good intentions.” It possesses a bleak, bottom-of-the-glass feel into which a few cracks of hope and redemption appear in the chanted chorus; “come on, come on, come on and laugh with me… sometimes you’ve just got to make it on your own.” A wounded San Francisco pop take on Spiritualized anyone?

Owens’ sombre just-woken-up drawl manages to convey a range of complex and contradictory feelings throughout this album. Together with the music – cherry-picking moments of 50s surf-pop, West Coast psychedelia, 70s guitar rock and 80s shoegaze – this makes a satisfying, if emotionally draining trip through the darker side of teenage dreams, summer love and disappointment.

Bad times never sounded so good.