Snow Patrol

The band began in Dundee in the 1990s, with early records that sat closer to rough-edged independent guitar music than to the arena ballads that later made them famous. Final Straw in 2003 changed their reach. “Run” became the obvious breakthrough, but the sharper rhythms of “Spitting Games” and “Chocolate” are just as important to the album’s personality.

Eyes Open followed in 2006. “Chasing Cars” built a huge song from very little: a repeated guitar figure, a plain vocal line and a slow accumulation of force. Around it, “Hands Open”, “Open Your Eyes” and the Martha Wainwright duet “Set the Fire to the Third Bar” showed a band capable of more than one kind of emotional release.

A Hundred Million Suns in 2008 and Fallen Empires in 2011 widened the arrangements, bringing longer structures and more electronic colour into the songs. Later records continued that development, but the most useful starting point remains the pair that carried them into the mainstream.

The ballads can be so familiar that their construction becomes easy to miss. A Snow Patrol song often waits before showing its full size, letting repetition change the weight of a phrase. The louder guitar songs give those moments a different context: this is a band with a nervous pulse as well as a gift for the slow, open chorus.