WE are living in uncertain times. You don’t even have to read the news, switch on the radio or TV or venture onto social media to know that we are in trouble – as a planet, as a continent, as a country and in our communities and workplaces. At times it seems the tsunami of bleakness is relentless.

All this may make for gloomy art, but in the hands of geniuses, such uncertainty is meat and drink – the raw materials of great work.

Take Pumarosa, who took a long hard look at the world and their own personal lives, squint and hit us with us with shimmering indie-rock which veers between downbeat and uplifting.

And at the heart of it all is Isabel Munoz-Newsome – the dancer and theatre set designer now frontwoman of possibly the country’s most exhilarating new band.

“This country is getting more and more right-wing,” she says.

“We are not dreaming.”

And instead of sitting back, they write music with “an energy to change”.

Having enjoyed a year which has seen them earn recognition for their variously fragile and cacophonous electro-pop, they are again on the road and on Monday play Oxford, with a gig at The Bullingdon.

It sees them promoting debut album The Witch, featuring the almost eight minute-long Priestess (the video for which features Isabel’s sister Fernanda, a dancer and choreographer), synth-rich Cecile and jagged pulse-racing Honey.

That song stems from a place of anger, she says, because “there’s a lot to be angry about”.

It was partly inspired by Adam Curtis’ documentary Bitter Lake, which explores how the West has misunderstood other cultures. Like I said... there’s a rich source of angry art out there.

Pumarosa are a band defined by odd spaces.

There was the half-knocked down house in Peckham they played, where the band carried on performing despite a gas leak and power cut.

A packed-out crowd watched through gaps in the walls and the landlords swore after they’d never allow a band to play there ever again.

Then there was the old Italian cinema, perched on the wild Calabrian coast, in which they were invited to write and record by a local surrealist. There were those singular gigs at warehouse parties and Shakespeare’s Globe. And there was the Streatham studio of eccentric producer Dan Carey (Kate Tempest, Bat For Lashes, TOY), where their debut album took shape.

The dynamic Isabel is joined by

bassist Henry Brown, drummer Nicholas Owen, guitarist Jamie Neville and multi-instrumentalist Tomoya Sukuzi – who switches between saxophone, keys, and electronic effects – twisting Isabel’s already meandering vocals into otherworldly shapes.

Isabel and Nicholas started the band by chance.

A friend was eager to start a new music project and invited the two to come and play, but failed to show up. Instead, the pair were left to lay the foundations of what would become Pumarosa, and they then sought “serious” musicians, people willing to give up everything for music.

Isabel says they wanted to make a “solid band”. “You’d usually get a group together and then people’s lives would get in the way,” she says.

Not in with Pumarosa though, with things falling into place from the off.

None of it comes without hard work though, and she says, they rehearse relentlessly in a space in Dalston.

“A long period of life has gone into these songs,” says Isabel.

And their patience is paying off , along with the dedication to art, politics and progressive thought which goes into their songwriting.

For Isabel, it’s not only all connected, but of increasing responsibility. She says: “I want to sing about females. Women’s characters and feelings, sexual or otherwise, are surprisingly unexplored compared to man-on-woman stuff.”

They say they’re trying to avoid a habit of “over-thinking” songs, however. Spontaneity is fundamental to the process –owed in part to sessions with Dan Carey, a man renowned for filling his studio with smoke and lasers to create an enlightening, all-consuming trip where everyone shares the same emotional investment.

Jamie says he couldn’t imagine working with anyone else. “And he just has such nice guitars!” he says.

“There’s excitement,” agrees Nicholas. “When Dan feels it, I think it goes round the room.

“It’s just about the feeling. And when that happens, I think everybody knows.”

Instead of taking it in turns to record, everyone’s in the studio at the same time.

Isabel describes the atmosphere as being “very intense,” adding: “You wouldn’t start reading. If people go on their phones – he wouldn’t say it – but you shouldn’t. It’s very focused. And when you track the songs, you’ll track all together. You’ll do the keys, drums and the bass, often all together. So you’re all in this mode.

“We’re trying to get the sweet spot,” Tomoya adds. “Then we can have a five-minute break!”

* Pumarosa play The Bullingdon, Cowley Road, Oxford, on Monday. Tickets from ticketweb.co.uk.

Album The Witch is out now on Fiction Records