The drum count that opens the track is almost cocky in its brevity: four sticks, no ceremony, straight into a riff Benj has apparently been nursing as a personal favourite. He's earned the affection. It's a lean, coiled thing, more sinew than fat, the kind of guitar line that doesn't announce itself so much as simply arrive and start working. Knopfler hovers over every bend and pull-off — Benj doesn't so much wear the influence as inhabit it, channelling that unmistakable clean, conversational tone that made Dire Straits sound like they were thinking aloud rather than performing.
Oliver's bass does the unglamorous, essential job of holding the song's spine together, locking in with a groove that nods toward "Sultans of Swing" without ever lapsing into pastiche. Arctic Monkeys and The Beatles get name-checked as touchstones too, and you can hear faint traces of both — a melodic instinct here, a rhythmic swagger there — folded into something that still sounds like its own animal rather than a tribute act.
Lyrically, the song trades in a kind of domestic unease that British songwriting has always done well: the friend who insists everything's fine while every signal says otherwise. Benj has described writing it about someone he used to know who refused help on principle, and that specificity gives the song its quiet tension. It isn't melodrama. It's the slow accumulation of doubt, the suspicion that a smile is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Smartly, the band resist the urge to resolve that tension with a big cathartic chorus — the title alone, repeated with just enough resignation, tells you the narrator has already stopped expecting honest answers.
Production-wise, the one-day turnaround shows in the best possible sense: nothing here has been polished into submission. It's a record that retains its grain, its slight roughness round the edges, the sound of three musicians who apparently spent their downtime locked in chess battles rather than agonising over compression settings. Benj reportedly won that tournament; on this evidence, he's also winning the songwriting argument within the band.
Where does this leave Sunday Smoke? Still very much a pub-and-small-venue outfit, by their own account, with a run of BBC Introducing airplay and a couple of "song of the day" nods that suggest someone at Broadcasting House is paying attention. "My Guess Is No" won't reinvent 70s rock revivalism — nobody's claiming it will — but it's a confident, well-constructed addition to a small but consistent catalogue, and proof that a trio recording in a single day, between chess moves, can still land on something that sounds considered rather than rushed. Keep going, indeed.