The sums, after all, are simple. You need a hook, a chorus you could bellow at a stranger on a night bus, and a feeling honest enough to survive the bellowing. CAR287 have done the arithmetic. This is the first single from a forthcoming five-song EP and the follow-up to last year's debut album, *Looking Through The Lens*. That record found the band squinting at the world. This one puts the camera down and takes the nearest person by the hand. The subject is the most durable in the pop canon: finding the person you actually want to be with, and being constitutionally unable to keep it to yourself. Nothing more complicated is attempted, and nothing more is required. The Buzzcocks built a career on the same giddy premise, and the Undertones and the Kinks spent theirs polishing it. CAR287 join the back of that queue with their heads held high.

Start with the guitar, because the band clearly did. The hook is the sort that lodges behind the eyes and pays no rent. It isn't a display of technique. It's an invitation, a small bright figure that says come in, the door's open, and it never overplays its hand. Among guitarists who mistake volume for conviction, such discipline is quietly thrilling.

Then come the keys, which are cool in every sense the band's own publicity intends. Used sparingly, they add colour and lift, a flash of neon on the wet pavement outside the gig. They stop the song being merely a guitar band with a grin, and they give it room to breathe and, crucially, to shimmer. The best keyboard parts in guitar music understand their place as garnish, and these do.

The refrain is the payload, and it has been field-tested. By the band's account, audiences have taken to it on the road, singing along and dancing, and you can hear why in its construction. It is built with a crowd in mind, all open vowels and easy momentum, a chorus that hands itself over to the room and doesn't mind if the room gets the words slightly wrong. That instinct for the communal is rarer than it looks. Plenty of bands can write a good song, but far fewer write one that makes strangers turn toward each other and grin.

The song was tracked at CTRL Space Records, Winnipeg's newest studio, and it's tempting to hear the freshness of a new room in the freshness of the playing. Whether or not that's fanciful, the sense of a band delighted to be exactly where they are is hard to miss.

It would be easy to sneer at a song this sunny. Cynicism is cheap, and the world is not short of it. What CAR287 offer instead is something harder to fake: sincerity, delivered at speed, with a tune attached. Dancing and smiling are not small things to ask of three minutes of music, and in this bleary moment they might be the only things worth asking.

So grab the person you love, turn it up, and let the refrain do its work. "End Of The Day" is a proper little gem, generous, unembarrassed and gloriously brief. If the remaining four songs on the EP carry half this much lift, Winnipeg has a band worth shouting about.