WE are living, as commentators and mental health stats keep telling us, in an age of anxiety.

It’s a theme bristling through Poor Girls/Broken Boys, the long-awaited debut album from Paisley art-pop band The Vegan Leather.

It’s a defiantly fun listen, combining spiky dancefloor anthems with elements of punk and metal and lyrics which sparkle with insight.

Take catchy album opener and recent radio hit French Exit, a lurching stomp about the inner conflict between wanting to stay out and have fun while enduring an avalanche of black thoughts.

“A French exit is when you leave a night out without saying goodbye,” explains Marie Collins, guitarist and co-writer of the band’s unorthodox party songs with Gianluca Bernacchi.

“It’s about the growing anxiety through a night out that could leave someone feeling panicky and needing to leave. It’s in the music too, which gets more and more intense up to that point where a person has to go.”

Collins is talking during a break from work at Create Paisley, an arts organisation for young people which focuses on developing creative skills and making a positive impact on the wider local community.

Create Paisley was where The Vegan Leather met around 10 years ago, initially as a coalition of two dubstep acts and Collins’s folk band. What drew them together was a love of music, from French dance pop legends Phoenix (who they supported last year) to multi-million-selling metallers Slipknot.

“Gianluca has tickets for their concert next year,” says Collins of the masked musicians. “He always says The Vegan Leather are a metal band.”

There are some riff-heavy rock outs on Poor Girls/Broken Boys, and the band can certainly tear it up live. Elsewhere they cook up grooves so hypnotic they could be dropped into a set at a hip club.

“Music was really a lifeline for me growing up,” says Collins. “And that’s true of the boys too.” She adds: “Though now Create Paisley is now a structured arts organisation, back in the day it was more an open mic night with everyone lugging amps around. To have somewhere to play together with other young people who loved music was very important.”

At first the four – Collins, Bernacchi, bassist Matt McGoldrick and drummer Duncan Carswell – honed their craft playing covers. Around five years ago they came up fan favourite Days Go By, a new wave dance epic that features on the album. They realised they had something very special together: a creative chemistry that conjures hook-laden songs with unusual lyrics about the pressures of modern life on young people, particularly in post-industrial towns such as Paisley.

Collins sees Days Go By as a companion piece to album closer Zeitgeist, another immediate disco track which talks of a “little red door and a house full of kids” and getting by when there’s “no more safety net”.

“Being from Paisley, it’s obviously a town with such a rich heritage, it had this big textile industry and all this amazing history,” says Collins. “But now it’s run-down, it’s depressing. The high street’s gone, there’s hardly anything on it. It’s almost like we live in this dichotomy with all this amazing cultural stuff but very little for young people. A lot of the album is about those dichotomies, of trying to live as a woman and an artist when you feel commodified and how people are broken down by different situations or pressures.”

Collins continues: “The songs are a testament to how people learn to deal with hardships and tell stories of how we either succumb or resist to the world we live in.”

Despite the challenges of being a young person in 2019, The Vegan Leather have never wanted for confidence when they play live together.

“It’s weird, because I am quite shy personally,” says Collins. “Playing music is a whole other world to daily life. It’s where I am most confident. I think I can say the same thing for the boys: when you are connected as a band, connected through music to an audience, a kind of magical thing happens.”

November 2, King Tut’s, Glasgow, 8.30pm, £11. Tickets: www.ticketweb.uk www.theveganleather.co.uk