Pop music has always been about hope. After all, it’s a young person’s genre and Hope is what young people trade in. The rule applies to every pop hook from “We’ll meet again” in the 1940s to “I hope I die before I get old” in the 1960s and it continues on into the present day with no signs of abating.

Well now Becca & The Broken Biscuits are telling Pop Music that it’s time to grow up.

“Train Driver”, the new single from the Manchester three piece, was directly inspired by a list of bullet points its singer had come up with in response to the common question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” - a list she’d written over twenty years earlier.

On it the words “alt/folk-pop vocalist with day job in higher education and administration” are conspicuous by their absence. “Deep-sea diver”, “cowboy”, “explorer” and “spy” are just a few of the fanciful answers that pepper this moving song about when Rites of Passage give way to Rites of Past-It.

Songwriter Becca Williams (like the other artists on Debt Records) has always chosen to do things her own way. Attempts by others to change her image or influence her performance style have repeatedly been met with disinterest from the singer. As a consequence Becca’s beautiful voice, easy onstage performance style and naturally infectious music has, for the best part of a decade, been confined to the opening slots of dingy Northern pub music nights. Nevertheless, a mixture of indomitable enthusiasm and dogged determination has meant that over the last year she has finally been getting the recognition that was always due to her: receiving regular airplay, mainstage festival bookings and a growing international fan-base.

It’s strangely apt that the songs are so often about going somewhere - both in terms of geography as well as aspiration. “Astronaut Song” - the single’s B-Side and a long-time live favourite with fans - is a good example of this but, when one delves a little deeper into Becca’s lyrics, the message is more often about going nowhere. They speak about a life away from Pop Music’s promises - a life far more familiar to the X-Factor generation than to any other in the history of the mainstream music industry.

So it is with great pleasure that this independent label announces the release of “Train Driver”, the first of many projects Debt Records has planned with The Broken Biscuits. I’m tempted to make a Train Driver pun about being “on the right track”. But I won’t.

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