(Rock Action)
While old-school fans may lament their softening, the Glasgow band swap rage for refuge as they face personal strife – and their 30th anniversary

Mogwai’s 11th album commences with an icy electronic arpeggio enveloped in reverb. Beneath, other, deeper, darker synthesiser tones build and glide. The effect is both faintly ominous and cinematic, perhaps because the sound bears a resemblance to the electronic scores that director John Carpenter devised for his movies in the late 70s and early 80s. It’s a suitably grand and portentous opening for The Bad Fire, an album that coincides with Mogwai’s 30th anniversary.

If you’re old enough to remember Mogwai as tracksuit-clad teenage upstarts on the fringes of 90s alt-rock – with their gobby interviews and Blur Are Shite T-shirts, their albums named after gang graffiti and their habit of referring to keyboardist Brendan O’Hare, formerly of Teenage Fanclub, as “the relic” – the notion of them as a stalwart band whose albums now regularly make the Top 10, who command documentaries and autobiographies, feels undeniably odd. But an august institution is what they have become – Britain’s best-loved and longest-serving purveyors of what we might as well call post-rock, despite the band’s aversion to the term.