Speaking of a love of songcraft and the richness of York’s music scene, it is an outstanding and affirming debut.

Rowan and Friends have ‘Rock N Roll Super Powers,’ or so their spokesperson/lead singer and songwriter, Rowan, declares. “I’ve got Rock N Roll Super Powers, I can play for hours and hours.” A leading force in the York scene as a live staple, open mic regular and an industrious promoter, Rowan does have some legitimacy to the claim. The lyric from the title song, reportedly inspired by seeing Pavement a few years back, speaks to this way of life. With speakers constantly blaring in the practice room or at some venue or other, it is “all feedback to me” and the feedback feels good.

It has taken a lot of time, experimentation, direction changes and name changes, to arrive at this, the debut album under Rowan and Friends. Rowan’s music ranges in style, tied together by his earthy vocals and clever song stories, charming and often poignant and always told with a self-conscious appreciation for the song form. This collection pulls together these consistencies and inconsistencies, offering a rounded, jangling showcase of Rowan’s music. Uptempo shufflers like ‘Leeman Road’ and ‘Courage!’ have that joyfully shoestring feel that so enlivens favourites by the likes of Jeffrey Lewis and Belle and Sebastian, while slower moments like ‘If You Lose a Friend’ and ‘Fading Away’ explore more traditional folk forms.

The album is bookended by two tracks that are especially centred on music-making: ‘Once a Rockstar’ at the beginning and ‘Rock N Roll Super Powers’ second to last. The former studies the endless task that faces the artist, complete with affectionately tongue-in-cheek Guitar Hero guitars (and a wonderfully winding verse riff reminiscent of Pavement’s scratchier moments). Along the way, two numbered “Country Love Songs” further show that self-awareness of form. Neither indulges excessively in pastiche, however, the closest we get being the gentle yodel of ‘Country Love Song #1.’ Both speak to the simplicity and emotion of country music, though their final forms feel closer to Grant McLennan than Ernest Tubb.

The pairing of tracks 2 and 12 is further matched by the pairing of tracks 1 and 13, ‘The Everything Still to Come’ and ‘Fading Away.’ Both leaning into biographical lists that tell stories through chains of memories, place names, and even Rowan’s own song titles, they both zoom out from the album, to place it within the world that Rowan and Friends inhabit. We might think of them as introduction and epilogue.

‘Rock N Roll Super Powers’ marks the climax of the album, its definitive lyrics coupling with the giddily immense closing section, which crescendos into view before exploding into its refrain. “Harder and harder,” Rowan repeats, among increasingly intense and occasionally ridiculous guitar noises. In a relatively abstract way, it essentialises the joy of music as a racket for its own sake. Lou Reed put that feeling best: “Music’s never loud enough. … You should stick your head in a speaker. Louder, louder, louder.”

This album is never simply noisy for the sake of it, never shouty unless it has something to shout about, but within it burns that intense belief in the power of music, a power it retains regardless of whether it is being profound or silly or something else. Rock N Roll does give you super powers, it’s a weird magic right that lands right there in your hand whenever you grab the neck of your guitar.