Joke is the second single from Chastity Belt’s forthcoming album Time To Go Home, out on March 24th via Hardly Art. As with the title track, released a few months back, there’s a truly satisfying sense of indie-pop gone off-piste. It’s what you might expect to get out of a band like Alvvays if you deprived them of basic luxuries for long enough that they began to loathe that Archie chap and everything he stood for.

Having met in a small college town, Chastity Belt got together as a sort of joke / not joke in Seattle. Their latest press shots show the band’s four members (guitarists Julia Shapiro and Lydia Lund, bassist Annie Truscott, drummer Gretchen Grimm) posed in the style of those 80s/90s “get your awkward family portrait here”, with a backdrop that’s by degrees worse than train carriage decor. They are joined by sporting trophies, academic gubbins: such wholesome a-grade students they must be…

Their approach emphasises the sense that they’ll do whatever they feel thank you very much rather than be just another band or (cos you know how the media works) the latest all-girl band to try to break the male hegemony yadda yadda yadda.

Anyway, Joke is certainly no joke, and Chastity Belt are getting seriously good. Look out for that album later this month.