I’d struggled to explain Hyperdawn’s music to George on the walk down from Manchester Victoria. I’d just assured him they were good, shared quality company on Them There Records, and had this unconventional ambience about them.

It was a cold and miserable night so it was much appreciated when venue staff let us in pre-doors. Shell Company opened — tortured spoken poetry put to drawn-out guitar. After Hyperdawn had set-up I remembered just how tape-driven their music was; various looping machines linked themselves together in the light of miniature desk lamps.

Their new album, Steady, was to be played front- to-back and is the Salford duo’s best work yet. Their speciality, particularly on this album, is the subversion of structure. A jitteriness pervades tracks “Lucky you, lucky me,” “Basic,” and “Don’t like it,” and yet all is tightly controlled — transitioning from anticipatory ambience to thumping dance sections with ease.

Songs are defined as much by their machinery as by their performers with the clicks of a tape-join interrupting the flowing synths as percussion. Samples across the tracklist float like fleeting memories, manipulated or misplaced through repetition. No-one is doing it quite like Vitalija and Michael right now.

Traversing a sea of prolonged vocal harmonies, the album’s final and title track sees an additional singer join the stage. Here, among beautiful stretches of morphing voice, occurs a lovely moment in which Michael’s voice breaks, triggering a second run of the song amid nervous laughter. Where this may have been embarrassing for some performers, here it was warm and humanising, a fitting end to the set and something indicative of both the gig and the album.