The Japanese House, Exchange, Bristol

The end of The Japanese House’s first UK headline tour comes just a week before Amber Bain heads out on a mammoth tour in support of The 1975. The confines of Bristol’s cosy Exchange don’t seem able to hold her tonight as a result, with one eye clearly already on five nights at Brixton and beyond.

Bain comments that tonight’s show is quite a bit bigger than her first time in Bristol - indeed, almost all of this headline run has sold out - and from the confidence and sky-reaching ambition she shows here, there’s no upper limit for where she might appear the next time she comes around.

She rolls through the highlights from her two EPs with consummate ease, almost on auto-pilot but never complacent or unappreciative. There’s only one insight given into work on her debut album in the form of closer ‘Leon’, but this recently finished track on its own is enough to suggest an LP is only going to take her further.

‘Leon’ still employs the layered, warped vocals that appear on ‘Clean’ and ‘Pools To Bathe In’, but here, they’re delivered with greater conviction and confidence, and a feeling that more new material of this calibre isn’t far behind.

The songs from Bain’s two EPs, of which all eight are aired, are bigger and slicker on stage, and fit in with ‘Leon’ in showing an artist crying out for bigger things. When she returns from her transatlantic trek, things might be very different, and tonight shows she’s more than ready.