IT has become fashionable to dismiss The Gaslight Anthem as a Bruce Springsteen tribute band. Okay, so they hail from New Jersey, like Bruce, and sing blue-collar songs about girls, factories, rivers and cars, as well as about love and loss.

But there the similarities end. Brian Fallon, the lead singer and driving force of the band, is also heavily influenced by the early Clash and by Tom Petty at his most powerful. The result can be brilliant (as in their second album The ’59 Sound) and pretty darn good (as in this, their fourth album). The driving tone is set by the cracking opener, 45, in which Fallon bemoans his inability to forget a lost love and this urgent pace is maintained by the retro title track and by the atmospheric Mulholland Drive.

But it is on Mae, an agonisingly beautiful and haunting reflection on elusive love, that The Gaslight Anthem transcend any influences and create wondrous music which is unmistakably, and triumphantly, their own.