Nada Surf @ Gorilla, Manchester, 19 Apr

Towards the end of Nada Surf’s first set of the evening, bassist Daniel Lorca swaps places with frontman Matthew Caws. He takes lead vocals on one song from Let Go, the record that they’re playing in full tonight. Before playing Là pour ça, though, he addresses a question that might well have been on the minds of the near-sell-out crowd. “You might be wondering why we chose to celebrate this album this way,” which turned 15 in September of last year. “It’s because we didn’t know if we’d ever get to make it, and we didn’t know if it’d be our last. So we’re celebrating still being here.”

Sure enough, Nada Surf have now long worn the look of indie rock survivors. Let Go was released shortly before The O.C. helped launch the mainstream careers of a bunch of their contemporaries, and they never found the major-label big-league success of Death Cab for Cutie, the critical-darling status of Modest Mouse or the position as a byword for indie-pop quirk that The Shins claimed, and yet they’ve continued to do things on their own terms; 2016’s You Know Who You Are, their seventh LP, met with some of the strongest reviews of their career.

Few Nada Surf fans, particularly those of a more casual persuasion, would likely peg Let Go as the finest of their full-lengths – most would choose follow-up The Weight Is a Gift for that accolade – but it’s a remarkably tight piece of work in terms of the cohesion of the songwriting and that shines through tonight – a lot of records don’t suit being played live in sequence, but Let Go is not amongst them. The acoustically-driven Blizzard of ’77 segues neatly into the much brasher The Way You Wear Your Head and from there on in, it’s an energetic rattle through the record, in which even the mid-tempo likes of Inside of Love and Killian’s Red burn with a real vibrancy.

The second set, meanwhile, is a similarly full-throttle affair, a 90-minute greatest hits victory lap that includes epic takes on What Is Your Secret? and Dispossession as well as a rare outing for Stalemate from debut album High/Low that suddenly morphs into an apparently impromptu cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart. Having toured it extensively these past couple of years, it’s a shame that You Know Who You Are is largely overlooked, although Cold to See Clear – their best single in years – does make the cut.

Their two biggest hits are saved for the encore: Popular, an American high school satire, is perhaps showing its age now that Caws is 50 – he mumbles through the spoken-word verses like a man who’s no longer especially proud of them, with the whole track rushing along at twice the normal speed. Always Love is relayed more faithfully, and closer Blankest Year is extended to include several reprises of the chorus. 'Oh, fuck it / I’m going to have a party' is the refrain, roared back by the crowd, and a fitting one too – after all, that was clearly the rationale when it came to the decision to bring Let Go back out on the road.