Is WU LYF's return the most perfectly timed in indie history?

Or is a band as perfectly cult as this one best left where it belongs, in 2012?

It’s easy to be cynical about reunions. It’s even easier to dismiss youthful exuberance. It’s almost a duty to disparage 99% of UK indie rock made in the last 20 years or so. But when WU LYF announced their return last week, for a brief run of shows in their native Manchester and a couple of festivals in Belgium and France, all my cynicism melted away, at least for a while.

I wasn’t alone. Though hardly a mainstream concern (or even a massively influential underground act in terms of setting off a huge wave of soundalikes), WU LYF meant a hell of a lot to certain people for a couple of years. Many of my friends were among them, and we all got very excited when that distinctive cross-like logo (the ‘wucifix’) began popping up on billboards and social media the other day. In many ways, my friends and I were basically the perfect demographic for WU LYF: skint teenagers in a small town in the north-west, seeing this group of scrappy-looking kids just a few years older than us, just a few miles up the road, seemingly create a cultural phenomenon for themselves and their mates with a thrilling degree of contempt for the music industry in London. It feels quaint now, in so many ways, but having spent entire childhoods (and subsequent adulthoods) being told these kinds of stories about the punk and post-punk years to the point of utter tedium, here was finally a story that felt like our own. That’s what independent music is meant to be about, right?