What the band have understood — and what so many before them have catastrophically failed to grasp — is that football songs are not actually about football. They never were. They are about the space before: the walk to the ground with your collar turned up, the beer consumed on an empty stomach at noon, the electric impossibility of believing your team might just, this time, actually do it. Sombre Chairs have bottled that feeling with something approaching scientific precision. The track opens on a riff that arrives like a boot through a pub door — crunchy, assertive, not especially subtle — and exactly right. Subtlety would be a betrayal.

Chris's guitar work is the spine of the whole enterprise. The tone is thick without being murky, a kind of muscular jangle that sits somewhere between the post-Britpop guitar bands that defined the early part of this century and something more contemporary, more immediate. It crunches where it should crunch and opens up — genuinely, chest-throwingly opens up — when the chorus demands it. Andy's bass does something quietly clever underneath, anchoring the bottom end so firmly that the whole thing has a physical weight when played loud, which is the only way it should be played.

Martin is, not to put too fine a point on it, a drummer who knows exactly what a song needs and resists the temptation to give it anything more. The rhythm is punchy in that literal, satisfying sense: you feel it before you process it. It is the kind of drumming that makes you wonder why anyone ever bothered with anything more elaborate. This is not a criticism. This is the highest compliment one can pay a drummer playing this kind of song.

The structure deserves more attention than it is likely to receive. There is genuine craft in the way the verses coil tension before the chorus breaks it — the sense of held breath before the collective exhale that the refrain provides. *Can't Stop Spinning Around* understands that the greatest chants are the ones that feel inevitable once you have heard them, that lodge themselves somewhere between the cerebellum and the throat and simply will not leave. The hook here has that quality. You will be humming it at the most inopportune moments for longer than is strictly comfortable.

Lyrically, the band make wise choices. They are not trying to write poetry about the beautiful game, not reaching for high sentiment or grand metaphor. The lyrics operate in the register of the visceral and the communal — the shared experience of being part of something larger than yourself, of surrendering to collective hope. There is a wit to it, the kind of Brighton-seaside playfulness that characterises the best of the city's indie output, but it never tips into irony. Crucially, the song believes in itself, which is what lets you believe in it too.

The production is clean without being clinical. Everything sits where it should, the mix giving the guitars room to breathe and the rhythm section the weight it needs. No unnecessary ornamentation, no studio trickery deployed to compensate for songs that don't work on their own terms. *Can't Stop Spinning Around* works on its own terms. Emphatically.

There is something deeply satisfying about a band that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologise for it. Sombre Chairs are not trying to reinvent anything. They are three people who love guitar music and football and the feeling of singing with strangers, and they have made a record that captures all three. The World Cup will come and go. Whether their team does them proud or breaks their hearts, the song will remain — four minutes of pure, hook-laden, slightly irresponsible joy.