Ash

In 1995 Ash announced itself to the world as a trio of Northern Irish teenage pop-punk prodigies — Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray — and, having barely left school, they made their mark on the charts with breakthrough singles "Kung Fu", "Angel Interceptor" and the magnificently fuzz-bolstered "Girl from Mars". Here was an outfit who mixed the British punk grit of bands like the Buzzcocks and the Undertones with shinier elements from American tearaways like the Lemonheads and Weezer, and their fresh, fierce formula retained its power through to the 21st Century — check out 2001's fire-storming "Burn Baby Burn" (featuring sometime fourth member, Charlotte Hatherley). The album is dead — long live Ash's singular approach to new releases, in Next Steps.

After dabbling with movie projects — including a shelved horror film starring Moby and Dave Grohl — and returning to its original three-piece formation for fifth studio album Twilight of the Innocents (epic, adventurous title track included here) Ash decided to address the effects of music's digital revolution head on. Rather than record another album, they would set about compiling the revolutionary A-Z Series of regularly released singles, structured along alphabetical lines: the incendiary "Joy Kicks Darkness" was filed under the letter "B" while "Space Shot" ("H") began 2010 in fine style, followed a fortnight later by "Neon" ("I"). ABBA gets punked upsides the head by Ash, in Deep Cuts.

Nu-Clear Sounds (1998), the band's second proper studio full-lengther, has emerged as one of Ash's lesser-trumpeted belters — the kind of album that gets better with every return visit. "Jesus Says" finds the band swaggering like a gang of ne'er-do-well rogues, "Wild Surf" lives up to its title in a fearsome spume of guitar fuzz, while "Folk Song" rings the changes by sending us on a weightless free fall through clouds of sweet melancholy. Jaymo & Andy George's remix of "Return of the White Rabbit" takes the band into techno territory, while ABBA feels the heat of Ash's after-burner, thanks to a molten treatment of "Does Your Mother Know".

Born in a garage in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, Ash exploded into the mid-'90s with a supremely attractive combination of power and melody, stunning the world with debut album 1977, named in honour of the year Star Wars was released, and they've been plasma-blasting luminous bolts of pop-punk excellence in our direction ever since. Both as a trio and a foursome (guitarist Charlotte Hatherley added extra heft 1997-2006), the band has sidelined into the cinema — check out "A Life Less Ordinary" and the fizzin' title track from 2004's Meltdown, which made its way onto the Shaun of the Dead soundtrack — and from May 2009, they bravely chose to abandon the traditional album format and instead release a steady stream of singles. By the way, their cover of the Buzzcocks' "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" features Coldplay's Chris Martin on backing vocals.