Steve Simms and AJ Gilmore have been writing together for decades, and the song carries the ease of two people who no longer need to finish each other's sentences because they stopped interrupting years ago. They have given up the live circuit for the studio, which suits them. Freed from the van, the soundcheck and the sticky floor, they have made a record with room in it.

The room is the first thing you notice. The song opens on guitar so unhurried it seems to be checking the air before committing to it. Gilmore's voice arrives close and unvarnished, a narrator with a grievance he has decided to state calmly. That calm is a clever piece of misdirection. The subject is the bending of truth, the slow business of redefining words until a plain fact becomes an inconvenience and the person who mentions it becomes the problem. Gilmore gives his refrain the weary patience of a man explaining arithmetic to a committee: "Up is down if you control the words." It is a line you could scrawl on a gable wall or print on a tea towel, and either would do it justice.

Then the song grows. Simms, who handles guitars, bass and arrangements, plays the sort of architect who leaves the scaffolding up on purpose, so that you watch the structure rise. Guitars widen from a sketch into a skyline. The heavy rock, when it comes, is not the cheap lurch of a band remembering it owns a distortion pedal. It arrives as consequence, the volume matching the indignation. Eamon "Lenny" Lenehan's drumming deserves particular praise. He has the rare gift of playing hard without playing loud for its own sake, and he steers the dynamics like a man easing a lorry through a narrow lane.

Frankie McClay's production at Einstein Studios in County Antrim keeps the whole thing honest. Nothing is polished to the point of anonymity. The acoustic passages still sound like wood and string, and the heavier sections still sound like people in a room, sweating.

Then come the voices. The choir-like refrain is the song's masterstroke. A lesser band would have let Gilmore shout the central idea alone, and there is a certain romance in the lone dissenter. Rumour Den choose a better argument, which is that the truth gets sturdier the more people say it together. The stacked vocals swell with a communal, almost hymnal weight, and the effect is oddly moving. A song about being isolated for speaking plainly ends by gathering a crowd around the speaker.

It would be easy to file this under alternative rock and walk away, but the arrangement refuses the filing cabinet. It moves from hush to roar to chorus without announcing the changes, and the join between each section is nearly invisible. That is hard to do, and harder to make sound effortless.

The single is a first look at *Relapse*, a twelve-track album planned for vinyl, CD and cassette, which is the correct way to treat music that expects to be listened to from beginning to end. If the rest matches this, Simms and Gilmore will have made the record they say they have always wanted to make. They have no interest in chasing a trend, and the song is better for it. Trends date quickly, while a good argument, well played and sung by a crowd, tends to last.

*Shoot the Messenger* was released on October 30.