"Hey! If you're listening you'll hear/The world's inner decay/Forever turned out to be too long/La la la." The opening line of The Kissaway Trail's breakthrough album is the best introduction you'll get to a band whose greatest strength is their curious mix of fatalism and defiance, misery and joy.

Hailing from Odense, Denmark, a town hitherto famous only as the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, these five young men have known darkness and no mistake. Both bassist Rune Pedersen and singer and guitarist Thomas L Fagerlund have suffered the violent loss of their fathers, while Thomas wrote new single 61 about the nerve-shredding wait for a girlfriend to receive medical results.

But theirs is also some of the most euphoric music you'll hear this year. Not for nothing did they call their self-released 2005 album We Have Decided Not To Die.

"It's a very epic sound, an epic universe," says drummer Hasse Mydtskov of The Kissaway Trail's sound, which combines the emotional punch of five blokes crying out in unison with a thoughtful blend of guitars, banjos and mandolins.

"We know we're not creating a whole new sound but I hope all the feelings and all this heart we're putting into the music will be something people haven't seen before. We haven't invented anything but the way we're doing it is pretty unique."

Writing duties, as with lead vocals, are shared between Fagerlund and Søren B Corneliussen. Both are painfully shy and don't like to be interviewed, although they are, Mydtskov observes, making a concerted effort.

"They're definitely shy guys, no doubt about it," he says. "Both of them are very special, people have to come to them. But they're great performers, you can't feel it when they're performing at all.

"Soren, he is writing about what he wants to change about the world, and he has this dark and a little mysterious approach. Thomas, he's more of a love man, he is writing about his girlfriend and he definitely writes a lot when he gets hurt. Because Soren and Thomas are so shy, when they are having a hard time they can't talk about it so maybe they write songs instead."

The Kissaway Trail's creation of swelling epics that pitch between dark and light has inevitably seen them compared to Arcade Fire, and sharing the same sleeve artist, Tracy Maurice, doesn't help. But there's something unmistakably Nordic about this band, not to mention a sense that these five men are expressing things musically that they'd baulk from communicating in any other way.

"We're definitely fragile people and it makes us feel stronger when we're able to do this together," says Mydtskov. "This is a very, very big thing for us. So every time we're playing we're really trying hard. We know we have to do it best every time."

  • 7pm, £6, 01273 606906