Buy one, get three free. As we all scrape around in the gutter for every last penny, the annual NME Awards bash makes good on its value-led history. This is as rocking as austerity measures get, and if quality doesn’t always keep pace with quantity – who can forget the near-legendary bill from a few years back where The Killers found themselves propping up the likes of Kaiser Chiefs, Bloc Party and The (mighty) Futureheads? – for the sake of the price of a few pints, who’s arguing? This year, much vaunted American rapper Azaelia Banks kicks things off. Such is the battle to squeeze everyone in, she comes on at tea-time and we’re still negotiating the last of the snow. Shame – post-performance buzz seems buzzy.

Tribes make good on the widespread love offered to recent debut Baby. Here’s a palette that doesn’t show too much respect to its undoubted influences. ‘Sappho’ rattles skulls but there’s more in the armoury than bluster: ‘Corner Of An English Field’ is all about mood and reflection. Johnny Lloyd notes the response and demonstrates commitment rather than louche disregard, and his band leave to raucous cheers. A good shift put in, no argument.

The crowd swells and puckers up for Metronomy. With The English Riviera gaining kudos and sales after a Mercury nomination, the electro-poppers have quietly grown in stature. With their last tour finishing at the Royal Albert Hall, they could sell the 2,000 tickets needed to fill this place on their own but stealthy growth comes via playing wherever and whenever, and Joseph Mount and his cohorts have always carried themselves with a certain modesty. They create a warm glow in a venue notoriously difficult to heat up and, at their best (‘We Broke Free’, ‘She Wants’), they marry beats to a beautifully fluid, lost-in-space vibe.

If we’re talking ticket sales, Two Door Cinema Club could have filled the Academy for these two nights on their own and added one or two more for good measure. Riding out the potential career derailment that might have come as a result of being ‘the Glastonbury theme band’, Alex Trimble steps to the mic stand beaming. With debut Tourist History becoming a real old-fashioned word-of-mouth success story, TDCC are A Big Deal all of a sudden. How dat happen? Perhaps it has something to with the fact that unlike so many of their peers who cling to the charts with an almost pre-meditated waving of hooks and empty dynamics, TDCC infuse their bittersweet guitar pop with a touch more bitter than you might dare hope. If the indie rock dynamic at times does actually bring to mind the likes of previous Awards acts The Futureheads (bar chord thrust) and Bloc Party (sinewy lines), the craft beneath the tunes takes one back to Squeeze and the type of acts whose New Wave provenance built free-wheeling choonage around a skewed, slightly oddball worldview. The older than expected audience – students and couples in their twenties and thirties mix with awestruck teens – highlights the maturity. By the time ‘What You Know’ lifts the roof, the floor a mass of bouncing bodies, the trio wear grins a mile wide. Album number two arrives later this year. They’ll have outgrown this place by then. Arenas - don’t doubt it - beckon.

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