So, Deaf Havana are back with yet another huge leap, with ‘Old Souls’ being the second album that the group have released without former lead vocalist Ryan Mellor. ‘Fools and Worthless Liars’ saw Deaf Havana roll with the punches, and change their sound to account for this loss, but ‘Old Souls’ is the album of a band really hitting their stride and growing in to their new identity, and as a result it’s easily the best thing that they’ve put out to date.

With James Veck-Gilodi stepping up as lead vocalist and songwriter, Deaf Havana are producing much more mature and refined songs, and the sheer variety of the songs that they have on the record shows a band really stepping up and trying to do something a little different. The honesty in their songwriting is genuinely moving, and the specificity with which Gilodi pens his lyrics gives each song an identity, a story, each one identifiable and each one cutting close to the bone.

‘Old Souls’ is also a very English album, similar to Frank Turner in a way, and it paints a wonderfully vibrant and colourful picture of what it’s like to grow up as a working-class Englishman. The way that they capture the day-to-day life, the thoughts and the feelings, and the melancholy that always seems to pervade every inch of English life is, again, a testament to Veck-Gilodi’s lyrical prowess.

The title ‘Old Souls’ is incredibly apt, because in listening to the wealth of emotion and experience about which they write you’d think them much older than their years. There are references to Springsteen (’22’), whom they recently played alongside at Hyde Park Calling, and Dylan (‘Subterranean Bullshit Blues’), and the influence of both artists can been seen in the album, and that’s one of the most endearing things about the whole record: they’re writing music that they want to write, and music that they’d want to listen to, in a time when there’s not enough of that in the music industry.