There’s something different about The Rails on their brilliant third album. It’s not just the sound of the record, which is harder, tougher and rockier than ever before. Cancel The Sun is melodic and immediate, a record that brings together the musical pasts of Kami Thompson and James Walbourne – her family heritage, as the daughter of Linda and Richard Thompson, and sister of Teddy; his as guitarist for Son Volt, The Pogues and The Pretenders – in a record that sounds like a pure version of themselves. You could spend hours casting around for a term to describe it, but maybe the best one would be pinched from an Eliza Carthy album title: Anglicana – music that might originate in America, but is clearly and resolutely English.

“It’s a distillation of influences,” Thompson says. “In an English still.”

Fans of their first two albums – 2014’s Fair Warning and 2017’s Other People – might be surprised at the harder edge of Cancel The Sun, but they shouldn’t be. Fair Warning had been a gorgeous revival of the classic English folk-rock sound (issued on Island’s pink label for full attention to period detail); Other People was a sturdier version of the group, Walbourne turning more to electric guitar. Cancel The Sun isn’t a completely new departure, but it sounds as though Thompson and Walbourne have relaxed into doing the things they do best: those glistening harmonies are draped across the album like velvet. “We sing together, and we can’t wait till the other one joins in,” Walbourne says. “That is something that’s great and very natural, and we can telepathically do it now, which is a great thing to be able to do with someone. I don’t get that from anyone else”.

Cancel The Sun is indebted to the Kinks. It’s not that it sounds like the Kinks, but it shares their fellow north Londoners’ desire to cast far and wide to make the music they want, without sacrificing their individuality. “It’s that English eccentric thing they had,” Thompson says. “They they were so fearlessly themselves. We drew inspiration and confidence from that to forge ahead on our own path.”