THREE Edinburgh innovators have joined forces to launch their devilish debut single.

Dripn Angel is the first song written by Check Masses, a trio featuring Vic Galloway, Saleem Andrew McGroarty and Philly Angelo Collins; three key figures in the city’s music scene for three decades.

Back in 1990, McGroarty co-founded the capital’s first hip-hop club The Big Payback, and went on to be a regular face at some of the city’s most esteemed nights including Lizard Lounge and Chocolate City. He also featured on Demonstrate In Mass (One Nation Under A Dope Mix) by Sugar Bullet, a collective of pioneering locals whose influence can be heard today on the likes of Stanley Odd and Young Fathers.

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Now as one third of Check Masses, McGroarty’s fractured beats and sultry synths are allied to the otherworldly vocals of Collins and the clanging, bluesy guitars of Galloway, a champion of new Scottish music for more than 20 years as a BBC DJ and the author of Songs In The Key Of Fife, a memoir of the rich east coast music scene, and Rip It Up – The Story of Scottish Pop, the book commissioned to accompany the National Museum of Scotland’s landmark 2018 exhibition.

Out now on Fife’s Triassic Tusk Records, Dripn Angel is an eerie, lurching blues stomp you might hear on the jukebox in a dreamed truckstop on a lost highway. The track sees Collins, a member of various bands since the mid-1990s, further explores the psychedelic tones of Kings And Queens, a self-released acoustic album he cut with McGroarty.

The lyrics, says Collins, came “very fast, an outpouring … experimenting with unconnected words” after watching steamy late-1980s noir horror Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet.

“I’d recently rewatched Angel Heart and was trying to get the atmosphere and desperation and the futility of making a deal with the devil come alive in song,” Collins says.

“The blues come from the darkest part of a man’s heart, and trust me it’s all heart.”

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The accompanying video, filmed and directed by Gareth Goodlad, was partly inspired by the early homemade videos of Young Fathers, says Galloway.

“We wanted a lo-fi, psychedelic feel, to capture the claustrophobia and tension in the song,” Galloway says. “We think this is captured with the dancing silhouettes, churchyard gargoyles, album artwork and Philly’s yearning vocals all colliding on-screen.”

With more music and dates set for the coming months ahead of their album Nightlife in May, Check Masses launch the single at the end of the month with support from Gavin Sutherland in his atmospheric electro alias Other Lands and Super Inuit, a heart-racing Edinburgh duo Galloway has often praised on his radio shows.

January 31, The Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh, 7.30pm, £8 on the door. www.facebook.com/CHECKMASSESwww.checkmasses.bandcamp.com. Dripn Angel is out now