Sydney Minsky Sargeant, the driving force behind surly indie-dance agitators Working Men’s Club, sidesteps his electronic roots with a collection of introspective, folk-laden songs far removed from the chaos of touring and sweaty nights in basement venues. Written ad-hoc over several years and recorded at The Nave Studios in Leeds, this album is a deliberate act of maturing from the fledgling wildness of WMC.

Leaning heavily on the psych folk of Bert Jansch and Nick Drake and doused with rudimental electronica, Lunga is the sound of a young man (Minsky Sargeant is still only 23) searching for expression in a gentler guise, more bucolic than bellicose. Typical of this new approach is ‘For Your Hand’, undulating acoustic guitar pock-marked with piano and set against his sonorous, double-tracked vocal. The results are lush and free-floating, and this formula is the basis for all that’s good across the album.

In a similar vein, recent single ‘I Don’t Wanna’ stretches up like a sunrise and has a confidence which carries into his lyrics: “If loving this is wrong, I don’t wanna be right”. And again, on the striking beauty of the album’s standout moment ‘Hazel Eyes’, it’s the simplicity of the songwriting that brings about the biggest successes. ‘A Million Flowers’ benefits from his front-facing honesty, resisting the temptation to overcomplicate the song and trust in stripped-down acoustic strumming and a bloody good chorus.

Elsewhere, ‘Long Roads’ plays the long game and is all the better for it, anchoring the middle part of the album and churning up texture with a mid-song breakout. Vocal mantras also figure heavily in Minsky Sargeant’s psychedelic take on what might otherwise be by-the-numbers folk musings, and this segue into the pharmaceutical keeps Lunga a fresh listen.

Not everything lands perfectly. A seven-minute interlude section feels like filler and could’ve been left on the desk, and the ending duo of ‘How It Once Was’ and ‘New Day’ skirts far too close to the kind of stuff you might find on a chill-out compilation. That aside, this debut effort proves (to himself at the very least) that Sydney Minsky Sargeant has a new road to follow. One that can be successful if he can harness what is an obvious talent for presenting meditations on the past and finding confidence in the future.