The Boxer Rebellion offer convincing proof that the only success worth having is the kind that is earned the hard way. The London-based quartet are about to release their new album, ‘Ocean by Ocean’, their fifth in a career now into its 15th year.

Fifteen years is more than most bands manage. It’s more enduring than the average marriage. “We have spent a lot of time chasing dangling carrots,” is how singer Nathan Nicholson chooses to sum up what it feels like to have been on the brink of the big-time – critical darlings often within a finger’s reach of that life-changing hit single – for so long now.

That ‘Ocean by Ocean’ is an accomplished, beautifully orchestrated and impeccably freighted album should hardly come as a surprise – this is, after all, an act that knows precisely what it is doing, and how to do it – but there is a depth of emotion to every one of these 10 songs here that lift each towards the hymnal. And so surely, this time, it will indeed translate to the masses, for like other great cult acts before them – Elbow, The National – their time has come, their crossover imminent.

Music is transient, and bands come and they go. Rare are the ones that stay the course, rarer still those that get better over the years until quietly, astutely, they deliver their classic.

The Boxer Rebellion are one of those bands, and ‘Ocean by Ocean’ is one of those records.

‘Lavishly layered, at their very best.’ – Q Magazine

‘The Boxer Rebellion have only gotten bigger and better with age.’ – The Line Of Best Fit