Performing for the first time in nearly two years, Tommy Lefroy sounded a little rusty for this low-key set in Edinburgh. Still, given the content of their promising new album The Precariat, maybe human imperfection was the whole point.

Tommy Lefroy are feeling precarious. The American-Canadian duo’s first performance in nearly two years is to around 100 people crammed into a record store at the foot of Edinburgh Castle rock and starts 30 minutes late, the band visibly flustered after a delayed train. The unsettled start leaks into their stripped-back performance: Wynter Bethel’s vocals are patchy, occasionally drifting flat, whilst Tessa Mouzourakis seems uneasy on stage banter duties, introducing songs too early and forgetting the set list.

In a way, Tommy Lefroy’s imperfections in Edinburgh (“this is very human, no AI here!” Mouzourakis says) are perfectly fitting for this show previewing their debut album. It’s called The Precariat, a term coined by Guy Standing in 2011 to refer to the mass of society dealing with the material and psychological challenges that come with a lack of job security or, as the duo put it tonight in typically well-read terms, “a general feeling of anomie, passivity, and hopelessness”. Technical difficulties aside, that feeling of passivity best comes through tonight on Slush Puppy, which describes being “stuck at the top of the Ferris wheel” and drinking “chemical” soft drinks to the tune of a sugary pop hook.

Bethel and Mouzourakis first bonded over their love of American supergroup boygenius (their name, an obtuse reference to a Jane Austen suitor, similarly gently mocks white male “genius”) and it’s Julien Baker that Bethel seems to be most channelling here with belted vocals that only grow in power as she gradually eases into the set. The two vocals work together so well – Bethel’s primal roar, Mouzourakis’s more grounded lower harmonies – you end up wishing they put them to work on more ambitious compositions. Angel in the House, for example, is serviceable, but the grungy guitar atmospherics of the studio recording end up sounding washed out and aimless tonight without the assistance of a drummer or bassist.

Threat works best for this low-key set, a song written in 2019 long before the band’s rise to fame that still sounds achingly vulnerable and all the more powerful for it’s quietness – at least that’s until Mouzourakis accidentally turns down Bethel’s guitar, and the duo have to restart a chorus. This record store tour partly serves as preparation for bigger shows across the US to come, with a new set list and new gear to work with, as the band explains to me after the show. Tommy Lefroy’s upcoming gigs will no doubt be far more polished than this bad day at the office. I blame LNER.

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