Start with the voice, because the band themselves would. Sydney doesn't so much sing as release pressure. Where the studio version of the song carries a certain wounded composure, the live take lets the valve go. She leans on the vowels until they fray, drops into a low, almost conversational snarl, then climbs out of it with a shout that suggests she has stopped caring who is listening. Fans of Alvvays will admire the melodic clarity underneath, and those who miss the Breeders at their most dangerous will hear the same gleeful refusal to tidy up. But the closest cousin is Sharon Van Etten, in that moment when the confessional pivots from sorrow to something nearer to defiance. Sydney sits comfortably in that company.

Behind her, Jeremy Rosenblum plays guitar like a man who has been handed the other half of an argument. His lines jangle, but they have teeth, chiming and then biting, ringing out over the verses before the chorus knocks them sideways. There is no studio polish to hide behind. A note pushes slightly sharp in the second verse and nobody flinches, least of all the listener, because the wobble is evidence. This is how the thing sounded in the room. The rhythm section, meanwhile, keeps the whole contraption from flying off the rails, the drums thumping along with the kind of unfussy swing that makes a crowd move before it has decided to.

It matters what the song is about. This band has made a career of turning the private mechanics of a marriage into public property, and the parent album, *When and How It Happened*, dealt frankly with the rocky business of learning to be, and not be, polyamorous. "Jealous Love" is the sharp end of that conversation: the sting of watching someone you adore turn their light elsewhere, and the horrible, comic realisation that your own heart is not nearly as evolved as your principles. In lesser hands this would be either mawkish or sanctimonious. Here it is neither. The lyric is rueful, a little self-mocking, and utterly without self-pity, and the live setting lets that rawness hit with a force the polished version only hints at.

There's also the matter of the crowd, who can be felt rather than heard, a low hum of recognition in the gaps between the choruses. Live recordings often fail because they preserve the noise of an event without its electricity. This one catches the electricity. You can hear a room full of strangers realising, somewhere around the second chorus, that they are in the presence of something actually happening, not a band running through the set to get to the encore. The final chorus, with the guitars cranked and Sydney's voice stretched to its limit, arrives like a collective exhale.

It would be easy to file all this under nostalgia, to say that 37 Houses simply do 1990s indie rock very well, and they do: the crunch, the hooks, the sense that feeling matters more than finesse. But nostalgia is a retreat, and this is an advance. Nothing here is a costume. The tattoos are real, the marriage is real, the jealousy is real, and the volume is, mercifully, also real.

With the full *Live in Chicago* EP due on 20 November and the band heading for Oceanside's Pour House on the 14th, this single works as a bold calling card. It is messy in all the right places, tender where you least expect it, and loud enough to rattle the fillings. Play it once and you'll admire it. Play it twice and you'll start shouting along in the kitchen, wondering how a song about heartbreak became so much fun to be wrecked by.

Turn it up. The neighbours will cope.