The second album by the band who unwittingly invented a genre called, ahem, ‘Thamesbeat’ marks a complete change of direction for them. Is Twenty One The Mystery Jets coming of age?

It’s an album about the strange joy and daunting uneasiness to be found in reaching your early 20s and still not knowing which direction your life should be going, drunkenness, The Libertines, REM, Joy Division, Television, Syd-era Pink Floyd, The Wall-era Pink Floyd, young love, Girls Aloud, Kurt Cobain, self-harm, London, death, sex and what it means to be young and English and ensnared by all of these things in 2008.

But it’s not a synth-pop record. Not really, anyway. Why most other reviewers have referenced ABC and The Human League is beyond this one. Producer Erol Alkan has undoubtedly pushed the band in a poppier direction, but the bleeps, loops and vocal effects on Twenty One sound far closer to the work of Richard X (Annie, New Order) and Xenomania (Girls Aloud) than Phil Oakey & co.

There are, however, definite hints of Lloyd Cole & The Commotions here, but mainly in Blaine Harrison’s lyrics which are astute, honest and often very funny. On ‘Two Doors Down’ he even nicks one of Cole’s lyrical traits by singing about a girl who “likes to dance around her room to a worn out 12-inch of ‘Marquee Moon’”. With Cole it was Arthur Lee records, but that’s not the point, which is that you can tell a lot about a person from the songs they listen to – and a lot about a songwriter by the songs he writes lyrics about.

Harrison goes on to name-check ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ on the album’s secret track, which is also where he becomes an outrageously charismatic singer, trading falsetto lines about a “boy who cried wolf but couldn’t take it anymore,” and who feels “like half your life has gone / and you’re close to the edge but you’re hanging on”. A final, forlorn warning to “do yourself a favour and don’t do yourself any harm,” is the sad lament that sums up everything about this album, equally encapsulating and terrifying.

For all their previous worshipping of Pink Floyd (see 2006s Making Dens), you can’t help but think that Twenty One is a truer reflection of who The Mystery Jets are – essentially a bunch of 20-year-olds who were swept up and introduced to London (and adulthood) by The Strokes and Libertines when they first came out, but who can also see beyond/behind those bands short tenures as kings of, er, 'mainstream indie'. You also sense that, were it not for their own band, they probably wouldn’t know in which direction their lives should be going right now.

While The View and Courteeners just seem content to provide a watered-down version of both The Strokes and Libs, on Twenty One The Mystery Jets have emerged retaining the same fizz and joie de vivre that made Is This It and Up The Bracket special, while also managing to sound nothing like their heroes. Yeah, it’s unlikely to have the same impact that those albums had (The Jets are neither reckless nor cool enough to warrant mass media attention), but this record is a rarity: a fitting response to a couple of zeitgeist bands who have inspired almost nothing but drivel since their own careers petered out around 2004. (Matt Wilkinson)