St. Thomas, the debut album from The Scottish Enlightenment, is a project that seems born out of the frozen wastelands of Caledonia’s East Coast. That’s not to say that this is a cold record: quite the opposite, in fact (well, mostly). But it’s an album which has the rare quality of capturing the cold purity of a bright, chilly day on the Scottish coast.

This is a record that opens as it means to go on; with an echoing, haunting melody, “Gal Gal” breaks out into a slow paced, powerful instrumental track. “Earth Angel – With Sticks In Crypt” moves up a gear into what is a kind of rock dirge – but this isn’t a track reliant on sad strings, but plaintive, intricate guitars and vocals that are barely audible – not quite mumbled, but not quite enunciated either. It’s the distinctive guitar that raises this song up. Similarly, the harder (and ever-so-slightly faster) “Little Sleep”, a song which opens with a barricade being set up against intruders, uses guitars and snare-y drums effectively set up against the subtle vocals.

Yet guitars aren’t solely where this record is at. The hymnal “Taxidermy Of Love” is almost dominated by droning hums that make up the backing vocals of its opening; although, yes, the intricate guitar work remains, paired with what sounds like a clarsach. Minimalism and restraint are frequently the order of the day, particularly on tracks such as “Pascal” and “The First Will Be The Last”, where a militaristic beat accompanies the knowledge that “My spirit is / blackening fast”. But one of the great accomplishments of the record is that restraint never seems overly sparse, and the sound remains rich and textured. On tracks such as “Necromancer” The Scottish Enlightenment really let themselves get expansive: not only is the song a meditation on life after death, but the strong melody is thickly layered with everything including those ever-present humming vocals.

This isn’t light listening – it is “Ecclesiastical Rock” after all, and there’s a song called “My Bible Is” (“My Bible is filled with / death and violence / like nothing else I’ve ever read / And my Bible is filled with / love and beauty / like nothing else I’ve ever read”). One of the more upbeat moments on the LP is the revelation that “You are better than me, my love”. But St. Thomas demands your attention in all the best ways. Like fellow miserablists Arab Strap, The Scottish Enlightenment draw upon a certain strain of dour Scottishness and a sense of personal antipathy that can seem pretty challenging. It is a record about disappointment and fear, yes, that’s true: but it avoids the seedy side of the Strap’s frustrated lovers, and reaches for much higher tones, covering ground from crumbling faith to struggles against one’s own personal demons. “You’d be a fool to try to dance to it”, advises the website, “but then again that’s not really the point of a record that tempers with existentialist thinking and ecclesiastical rock now is it?”

Not at all; not at all.

St. Thomas came out on 15th November.