Drummer Stephen Henderson is a member of pianist Fergus McCreadie’s 2022 Mercury-nominated trio. This is the debut by his quintet formed by the young Royal Conservatoire Scotland graduate in 2018 and he comes from a lineage of Scottish jazz composers who have engaged with folk music, in his case from his rural upbringing in South West Scotland.

Yet listening to the album, the emphasis on the folk music thing seems like a case of promotional typecasting. Although thematically Henderson evokes the folk melodies and something of the pastoral ambience of his background, there’s nothing calmly picturesque about the music for the most part. As the band moniker suggests, there’s a Viking-ish thrust to Henderson’s folk-derived tunes with an infusion of insistent energetic grooves as you might expect from a young drummer, a Miles-ish psych-jazz ambience, contemporary jazz-rock riffage and impressive soloing especially by the guitarist Graeme Stephen. Saxophonist Konrad Wisniewski’s playing is as influenced by fellow North European Jan Garbarek as he is by any US post-bop saxophonist.

It’s a debut unpretentiously balancing cheer and melancholy by a positive-vibing simpatico ensemble that sound like they’re always on the same page.