A lesson in pronunciation: when recommending Glaswegian quintet Kilgour to discerning indie-rock listeners, please do resist the natural Scottish urge to rhyme their name with ‘hour’ and go for ‘gore’ instead. The band are named after Kilgore Trout, a key character in Kurt Vonnegut’s classic satire Breakfast Of Champions. Kilgour frontman Fionn Crossan is a ‘massive Kurt Vonnegut fan. I love the absurdness of his writing and his ability to say something that would make you laugh as much as it would make you cry.’ But he (Crossan, that is) forgot to check the name’s spelling before setting up his new band’s Facebook page. So Kilgour they remain.

Crossan hails from Belfast where he grew up on folk music. ‘My dad plays mandolin and my childhood was spent in pubs with him when he was playing in trad sessions.’ His own formative tastes included Nirvana and Slipknot, and he spent years as a drummer with no particular notion for songwriting until he had a Ben Howard-inspired epiphany in his late teens, picked up guitar again and began experimenting with open tunings. His own songs started flowing even as he was gigging as the drummer in indie rockers Brand New Friend.

‘The Belfast music scene is great,’ he says of this time. ‘It’s very small compared to the Scottish and UK scenes but the benefit of that is there are so many different styles of music going on you end up playing gigs with wildly different acts.’ Crossan soon discovered the difference in scale when he moved to Glasgow to study. ‘Immediately I loved it. Just being able to pick any night of the week and there was some band I liked playing somewhere or something that sounded interesting. It amazes me that even in the most difficult times for live music there’s still a million things going on in Glasgow.’

Kilgour are now part of that ecosystem, having formed in 2019 with bassist Euan McMahon and then expanding to a five-piece featuring guitarist Isaac Davie, keyboard player Katie Mackie and drummer Jimi Maffei. They’re built on a batch of songs Crossan wrote while hunkering down back in Belfast during the first covid lockdown, playing with his dad and indulging his love of noise on his first electric guitar, bought with furlough money. The yin and yang of folk and rock (but mostly rock) can be heard on an impressive debut album, How To Put Your Hat On. ‘Existentialism is a big theme, being a cynical stressed-out guy as everybody was in lockdown,’ reflects Crossan. ‘But now it is very much about getting these songs out to as many people as possible.’

Kilgour: How To Put Your Hat On is released by Last Night From Glasgow on Friday 8 March, and launched at Stereo, Glasgow on Saturday 9 March; main picture: Grainne Fellowes.