Warpaint return from a six-year lay-off with the same line-up but a glitchy, claustrophobic new sound on Champion.

You’d probably expect a song called Champion to have a euphoric, celebratory vibe. You’d be wrong.

Warpaint’s comeback single has a sparse, claustrophobic mood, built around glitchy beats and a tentative vocal, that you expect to open up for the chorus. It doesn’t.

Yet I find it utterly compelling, with that voice floating in the spacious production, creating an atmosphere of anxious anticipation. It’s a song for our times.

I’ve liked Warpaint since I first heard them 12 years ago, their ghostly harmonies and jangly guitars mingling mellifluously on a song called Billie Holiday.

The quartet of California girls seemed even more interesting when I discovered their debut EP bore the distinctly un-SoCal title of Exquisite Corpse.

Emily Kokal, Jenny Lee Lindberg, Theresa Wayman and Stella Mozgawa (an Aussie latecomer to the band) are the most democratic of units, their sound very much the sum of their individual components.

If it didn’t sound simplistic, you might call them the distaff Radiohead in the way they are constantly trying to expand on their original template; as often by stripping back (as on this tune, with its dub-like production) as by expanding their sound.

Over the past few years Warpaint have evolved as people too, as life brought babies, jobs, tours, solo albums, intercontinental and cross country moves, forcing a new approach to recording.

Physically separated by the pandemic, each musician recorded her parts for the new album separately – often in makeshift home studios – before sending on to the next, creating songs layer by layer.

This is the first result.