SIMON WHITTLE’S ears are ringing, the result of seeing Stiff Little Fingers play Glasgow Barrowlands the previous night.

Punk credentials firmly established, the guitarist and songwriter says his own band’s self-titled debut album — due for release on March 29 — has been a long time coming.

“It’s been a bit of a drawn out process to be honest. It’s taken a couple of years with us having families and jobs and stuff. Plus I live in Govan in Glasgow and the other two members of the band (bassist Debbie Ullrich and drummer Tef Lovegrass) live in Carlisle.”

The album happened almost by accident. The gutsy three-piece planned to record just two tracks at a no-frills recording studio in Dumfries — a punky remake of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song, “just to see how it sounded,” and The End of Friendship, “ actually written decades ago, when I was a teenager.”

Two became eight and so on, until the band suddenly found itself with an album. Clocking in at less than half an hour, Shot Balowski spits and snarls in all the right places but has the sort of goofy dumb-luck charm which means it doesn’t outstay its welcome. The band has taken Sideburn fanzine’s seismic three-chord clarion call Now Form a Band to heart.

Opening number Emily Does is three parts The Ramones to one part Phil Spector, a deranged graffiti-sprayed wall of sound. Whittle recasts doomed Suffragist Emily Wilding Davison as the original DIY provocateur, imagining her getting up to all kinds of “cat-and-mouse fuckery.” It is Sheena is a Punk Rocker with an A-level in politics.

Wordplay is one of Shot Balowski’s strong suits, raising Whittle’s lyrics above mere agitprop. One of the album’s standout tracks is Commander in Cheat, a seething-by-numbers take on Trump’s presidency. Imagine a cover of Motorhead’s Ace of Spades by Jello Biafra and Scottish scuba-punks The Rezillos.

Scoring points off Trump may be shooting fish in a barrel but there are some great lines: “A nightmare cartoon that just became as real as climate change or poverty,” bellows Whittle over a rolling tsunami of multi-tracked guitars.

“You can’t sit this one out and pray that things will settle down and that your order gets restored,” he implores elsewhere.

“There’s a lot of hate in there, a lot of criticisms and questions. In fact, there are more questions than there are answers. We call ourselves a socialist band but we don’t actually have any answers. I’m just really pissed off at everything in the mainstream media.”

Enter Destroy the Daily Mail, probably the first and last time Grigory Zinoviev and Mark Wahlberg will be name-checked together in song. “For as long as I can remember,” Whittle says, “The Daily Mail has been spewing out hate every day. I just thought we’d spew a bit of it back in their direction.”

Stuck for a middle section, the band approached Welsh poet Patrick Jones via Twitter. He duly obliged them with a whip-smart rant culled directly from the Mail’s pernicious brand of celebrity obsessed headlines: “Lisa Vanderpump’s dog dies — Isis blamed.”

Inevitably, the album’s weaker numbers wear their influences on their sleeves — the band can expect a call from The Ramones’s lawyers if they ever get whiff of US TV –— but Shot Balowski is the sound of a band having fun fun fun and determined to put some of that feeling back into punk, though Whittle tells me the Pete Townshend scissor kicks he pulls on stage play havoc with his knees.

Punk’s not dead. It’s just feeling its age.

Shot Balowski’s debut album is released by Abnormal Product on March 29. Pre-order with free badges: shotbalowski.wordpress.com/shop