This seething blend of difficult emotions is explored in One True Pairing’s palette of taut and clipped guitar that flickers between New Wave and even at times 80s MOR titans Dire Straits, looming synths, trickling melodies. Above it all Fleming’s voice, ranging from haunting despair to croon like a Yorkshire Scott Walker, is at its best of his career, giving life to “the angry northern Springsteen record that I'd always wanted to make.” He says that “I want to be obvious in what I'm saying - it's neo-heartland rock". These "heartlands” are the moors above Bradford or Cumbernauld, "places where people live their whole lives and do these things and succeed and fail.” Within this there’s a continuation of the exploration of masculinity that made Wild Beasts so unique. "There's a despair about it, being shown images of masculinity that either you're expected to be, or people assume you are. Even in today's environment you get these reflections at you." Other big themes of the album are heard in ‘Zero Summer’, an exploration of the gravity of expectations on masculinity, and in tracks like ‘King Of The Rats’, repeated patterns of behaviour. As was the case in Wild Beasts, Fleming continues to wrestle with the complexities of male identity, looking critically back over his own life as he does so. "I always get very annoyed with things that come from the position of observer," he says. "I want it to be from the place it purports to be from". The characters in his songs are exaggerations of people who he grew up alongside, or himself, and how it feels to try and discover a sense of yourself within masculinity in a small northern town. 'Weapons', for instance, "is about male violence and how you're marinated in it, from shit role models, hopelessness, fighting, even porn; all this contributes to a sense of who you should be". Then there’s the sense that he’s always had, that even as a musician, he’d never be welcome in the middle-class world of the arts, as reflected in ‘Elite Companion’.