Listening to Heavy Profession is kinda like watching a Larry Clark film – there’s something unsavoury and a little creepy about the whole experience, but equally, the art being presented is so damn good that you can’t help but being drawn in. The mood is set by Darren Sylvester’s (actually Karl Scullin’s) uncomfortably intimate images of key St Helens duo Jarrod Quarrell and Hannah Brooks, whose gaunt, shadowy forms adorn the sleeve, looking like a Davide Sorrenti photo from the mid 90’s. The lyrical mood is similarly dark, and the music is the sound of basement flats in winter, slow and numb, all frost brushed windows and monochrome isolation.

Quarrell’s lead vocals are sardonic enough to betray only a hint of hurt beneath bruised bravado, an effect that’s replicated by his lyrics, which sneer and snarl but also ache palpably at times, always circling their subject and addressing it obliquely, but never failing to stir a response in their listener. Saint Luke, for instance, narrates the story of the disappeared protagonist of the same name-it’s hard to know exactly what’s happened to him, but it’s clearly not good. How To Choose Your Guru Pt 2 dissects human relationships with scalpel cynicism, while the strung out energy of Coffin Scratch makes it the album’s most upbeat song, but also it’s most jittery and unsettling.

The only moment of genuine warmth comes during The Only Ghost In The Room, a one-and-a-half minute meditation on love that’s one of precisely two places on the album where Brooks’ voice – otherwise given to doubling Quarrell’s vocals, singing in the same register to creating a distinctive and curiously disconcerting effect – is given space to express itself. Penultimate track Positivity is perhaps the most challenging song here, the lyric consisting of one word – the song’s title – slurred over a grinding, opiated guitar part, making for a mocking graveyard mantra – but also, perhaps, a longing for a flicker of warmth in the cold.

Writing music like this? Man, that’s a heavy profession – but it’s also produced the best Australian debut of the year to date.

Tom Hawking