AlunaGeorge - Your Drums, Your Love

There’s a great history of bands with terrible names nonetheless creating inspired music. The Bob Dylan-sired The Band are perhaps the epitome. The The were okay too, right? Anyway, that’s all academic, because AlunaGeorge - that’s the duo’s first names stuck together - don’t make music that sound anything like those other groups, though what they do make is quite inspired.

Like much of their existing oeuvre, ‘Your Drums, Your Love’ harnesses the current renaissance in two-step, where sparse beats and melancholy keys are finally allowed to acknowledge the 90s R&B production that inspired it in the first place. That means that the single is both sexy and sad, flirty and forlorn - check the chorus that begins ‘I’ve been treading water for your love / Whether I sink or swim / It’s you I’m thinking of’ - addictive and affecting.

Aluna provides some distinctive vocals and lyrics, knowing when to play it cool and when to let it rip; George provides a pitch-shifted refrain of the titular phrase, juttering drum machines, sampled whooshes of wind and twinkling, whistling synths; together, they’ve made one of the better pop songs of the year. That’s teamwork - needn’t make that so literally clear for your name, mind.