The engine room does the persuading. Ozzie Woods's bass line is the lead singer in all but name: prominent, restless and plainly in a better mood than everyone else in the room. Nick Pompou's drums keep a steady, upbeat pulse that never hurries and never flags, the kind of rhythm Peter Hook and Stephen Morris would have recognised and approved. Over the top, Burnie Eckhardt and Alex Riggen lay down dark guitar textures that hang like damp washing in an unlit cellar. The chorus arrives early, settles in and refuses to leave, in the manner of a houseguest with no onward ticket.

That refrain is the song's central trick. Riggen circles the same questions of who someone is, who they were, and what is left when memory begins to shuffle its own deck. Repetition here is a strategy rather than a shortcut. Each return of the vocal phrase tightens the loop, until the song feels less like a journey than a record skipping in a locked room, all while the rhythm section keeps pushing it down the road. It is a neat paradox: a tune about forgetting that you will remember by Tuesday.

The scenery comes from the American night. A rental car. A low radio. Porch light, clover, static, and the words people leave behind them. It is the sort of imagery Wovenhand might have scrawled on a motel notepad, and Riggen delivers it without theatrics, with a calm that is more unsettling than any amount of shrieking. Nobody here is auditioning for the role of Tortured Poet. The song simply drives on while the self quietly goes missing in the passenger seat.

Then comes the video, which is where the whole thing turns delightfully peculiar. Rather than the band glowering at a camera in a warehouse, as tradition and budget would normally demand, we get handmade marionettes in a spare wooden room, shot in faded, grainy 4:3. The camera alternates between full-body choreography and intimate close views of painted faces, beadwork, fabric, strings and shuffling feet. One green-tinged, moustachioed puppet stares out with the wide-eyed alarm of a man who has just remembered he left the oven on in 1974. It is faintly sinister and oddly tender, and it is cut with real patience. The strings are left in plain view, which gives the clip its quiet argument: everyone moves because something unseen is pulling, and the best you can do is keep time. For a song about identity coming loose from its moorings, that is a stroke of rather sly genius.

What keeps it from collapsing into arthouse affectation is the warmth. The worn, tactile look of the film matches the grain of the music, and the two feel handmade by the same pair of hands. Riggen, who also designed the band's artwork, clearly has a unified vision, and it shows.

It would be foolish to claim "Lost Literature" reinvents anything. The ghosts of The Cure, Bauhaus and Interpol are all present and drinking at the bar. But it wears its influences like a well-loved overcoat rather than a costume, and it has the one thing that so much gothic revivalism forgets: a proper tune. After the heft of September's "Derelict Crawl", this is the band showing that melody can hit as hard as mass.

If Lions and Ore carries on in this vein, with longer arrangements, quiet passages and heavier transitions as promised, the Quad Cities may be about to export something rather special. Dark, danceable and delightfully odd.