Restless moves and fidget dance. The underlit Factory warehouse band, fired up by frag-ment-ology. New waves for the art-house in your headspace.

Talkin’ shite. What is Shortparis?

When Mary Anne Hobbs first played them on her 6 Music Recommends show, gushing with unbound enthuso after seeing them destroy some festival or other, she mentioned Joy Division – something about the shadows and the intensity. The track was Beceno (all the titles are in Russian script, which I can’t type properly), and if Beceno is your first Shortparis exposure then it’s damned hard to shake those joy-di visions from your mind’s eye: robust paranoia, unseen twitchiness, confident uncertainty, rock-not-really. Nikolay Komiagin sings with a high pitch that pulls Beth Gibbons’s tense nervosa to mind, and Beceno’s on-the-run mood could fit Portishead’s Third, though it’s the only track that could. The rest of nacxa is way more up. Way more DANCE.

Shortparis: twitchy and addictive

But it’s not dance dance. Track 1’s industrial-retro kick with upfront tight-funk bass bounces right back to post-punk – no particular band, more the era and the experimenting vibe. Post-punk something is at play. And then, taut across the tops, is the voice you don’t understand.

Track 2 drops the Horn (Trevor): massive ZTT-style keyboard stabs over stilted bass, gearing up for the Shortparis percussion collective to ramp it up into a worldly electro rhythm thing. It’s a potent mix, perhaps best shown off on the title track – Parisienne nights with dark exotica throb – and the following track’s John Carpenter menace meets Bowie’s Outside: Wishful Beginnings.

Can you pin Shortparis down? Not really. Not beyond a culture-sample soundclash that feels like a guitar band but isn’t. Shortparis ride the fluid, anything-goes rush of Flamingods and Comet is Coming, maybe even Antidote-era Foals, but with different sources. There’s something of the industrial about this lot: danceable, yet not quite celebratory. Primitive. A bit tense.

Download the album and you get two tracks labelled as B-sides at the end. Ma Russie, sung in French, is a synth-heavy funker, and Yqueen ups the machine-rock action with drums that threaten a Nine Inch Nails storm. Shortparis make a global music – not ethno-rootsy but rhythm-heavy, urban and nocturnal.

Music for subway nights.

Communal and solitary.

Body music by head people.

(Bowie would have loved it, surely).

John Doran writ large about this crew in the Quietus – a lot of words, if you want to make sense of them – but the album is steal of the year, just TWO DOLLARS at Shortparis bandcamp. Don’t let that price cheapen the quality of your attention, though. This is not background device-filler. Shortparis are onto something special.