Have Scrounge been gifted the chance to open for Benefits on a run of UK dates purely because of the appropriateness of their name? Not at all – the south Londoners are a tight, tidy twosome who fully merit the opportunity and duly seize it with both hands.

A regular contributor to Loud And Quiet, Luke Cartledge is evidently as capable and comfortable performing music as he is writing about it, providing unusual and inventive drum patterns for Lucy Alexander to riff around and over. The vocalist/guitarist is playing truant from her day job as a school music teacher, and tonight’s set is a crash course in Scrounge’s debut mini-album Sugar, Daddy, culminating in cracking single Badoom. The lesson is the same as ever: get down to gigs early to avoid missing out on gold.

Benefits are a band born of Brexit, the product of a polarised nation at war with itself and rapidly reaching boiling point. Kingsley Hall is the voice of the dispirited, the downtrodden and the ignored, calling out the charlatans and racists who pollute both political discourse and daily life. As hard and pure as diamond, debut album Nails is a near-relentless onslaught of power electronics and hardcore punk drums. It’s heartening that music of such extremity can gain traction outside of the noise scene.

Anyone harbouring doubts as to how it would translate live needn’t have worried. Empire and Flag in particular are uncompromisingly intense. Hall’s regular accomplices, brothers Robbie and Hugh Major, whip up a bracing electronic hurricane, while drummer extraordinaire Cat Myers handles the challenge with aplomb. (Given that her previous assignments have included stints with Texas and KT Tunstall, this represents something of a departure.) Shit Britain – bearing the imprint of Hall’s friend and mentor, Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods – offers momentary respite from the gale-force assault, as does reflective album closer Council Rust.

Benefits are part of the post-industrial landscape geographically, politically and socially but also sonically, as acknowledged by Hall’s Front 242 T-shirt. The self-proclaimed “sweaty twat in shorts” / “Smoggie Fresh Prince Of Bel Air” is enthused about playing in a new country, though possibly comes to regret attempting to pronounce “Clwb Ifor Bach” when it precipitates a lively exchange about the fraught history of Anglo-Welsh relations. Any promises he made to himself to watch his language – with teenager Arlo Lippiatt of Pint-Sized Punk zine and his mum in attendance – are inevitably soon forgotten.

However impactful the sonic barrage is, it’s Hall’s words and slogans that resonate loudest – from Marlboro Hundred’s “REJECT HATE” to “I shout because that’s all I’ve got left”, the latter both an admission of impotence and an expression of agency. On Traitors, he complains bitterly “We get the future you deserve”, while “WAVE YOUR FUCKING FLAG” goads Little Englanders obsessed with pomp, ceremony and an airbrushed vision of Britain’s imperial past.

As is often the way, there’s a suspicion that Hall is preaching to the converted – the “you” he addresses are likely to be too distracted tugging forelocks and wolfing down coronation quiche to notice. But the converted here tonight leave even firmer believers in the value of what Benefits have to say, and how they say it. There’s some positivity amid the bleakness – most notably in Hall’s insistence that everyone has the power to effect change – but venting anger is a vital first step.

Benefits + Scrounge, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Mon 24 Apr

words BEN WOOLHEAD photos BETHAN MILLER