METZ / Battery Face / Blades @ Broadcast, 29 January

Three, they say, is the magic number. Tonight, Broadcast has three bands, each of them a trio, which must count as a good omen for the sizable crowd who have ventued out on this miserable Tuesday evening. The opening set from Blades is a promising one. The Stonehaven group keep a simple beat and paint every song with a thick coat of reverb borrowed from the C86 shed, but they display a keen eye for a pop hook that suggests this is a band with a strong future.

Battery Face meanwhile are quite unlike any other contemporary Glasgow group. Their debut album, Addams Family Values, was one of the more beguiling domestic releases of 2012; those heavy organ riffs, choppy guitar breaks and lightening quick drums are even more disorientating when performed live at considerable volume. It prepares the crowd well for tonight’s headliners.

METZ are a post-hardcore trio from Toronto, the latest in a long line of fresh Sub Pop signings to wear the journalistic albatross of ‘sounds like early Nirvana’. It’s certainly true that they have the immediate intensity of various bands from the label's Bleach-era; but a tribute act could never attract the kind of fervent following here tonight. Each member of the band is in their early 30s, yet they each have twice the energy and ten times the conviction of countless acts their junior.

There remains a lazy assumption that punk rock is the easiest form of music to perform. METZ don’t disprove this theory; they annihilate it. To play this fast, at this level of intensity, and still find sufficient room to create their own unique template is a testament to their collective skill and their burning desire to cut new paths through the sonic landscape. Headache comes with the forceful direction of Mission of Burma, played at such a pace it could shatter concrete walls. Having earned their stripes touring North America for the last four years, tonight their prowess shows.