DETROIT natives Frontier Ruckus love York. Saturday’s gig in The Basement at City Screen will be their fourth visit as they return to Europe in support of their fourth record, Sitcom Afterlife.

“We can only presume they keep returning because they have fun, and they only get asked back because they are such fun,”says Joe Coates, of concert promoters Please Please You.

Frontier Ruckus’ songcraft is the work of a gothic Americana band “steeped in the rose tint of the early 1990s”, which led them to embark on a trilogy of records on the theme of place. In a nutshell, they wrote of “the rust of a Midwestern suburbia anywhere and the edifice of those oft-crumbling surroundings baked with the deeply passionate memories they evoke” on 2008’s The Orion Songbook, 2010’s Deadmalls & Nightfalls and 2013’s Eternity Of Dimming, each album driven by Matthew Milia’s densely worded sermons. Now, they six years on from their full-length debut, Frontier Ruckusreturn with Sitcom Afterlife, a record marked by “a sense of urgency toward the present and a brevity that speaks of immediate passion”.

Milia will be accompanied on stage at The Basement by long-time friend David Jones’s angular banjo and Zachary Nichols’s brass, chord organ and saw, while vocalist Anna Burch returns to touring with the band to “provide a honey-sweet gelatin that firmly bases yet sets each song into a full-throated fire”.

Frontier Ruckus will be supported at Saturday’s 8pm gig by Luxo Jr and Noah Clouds. Tickets will be available on the door.