It seems straightforward, barring new developments in technology, to predict what will be influential in music at any given moment. Assuming tastemakers to be generally mid-20s to mid-30s, and assuming nostalgia to be one of the more powerful forces in pop music, just look back, say, 20-25 years to see what’s likely to bypass the critical faculties and get straight to the warm and fuzzy bits that remind us of what life was like before we had to worry about tax, doing our own laundry and so on. Don’t get me wrong – it’s great, and largely unavoidable, to borrow ideas from those who’ve come before; it’s just a bit dispiriting to see a band take all they have from one three-year period at a time. Perhaps that’s what a canny band needs to do, though, and it seems at the moment that a whole hive of canny Oxford musicians have finished beavering away and are ready to be heard.

Take Foals’ hot tip and tour support Trophy Wife, for example. They’re a three-piece who play guitar, synth and electric percussion, and it all sounds and looks like a cocktail of synthpop pioneers and mid-80s chart acts like OMD, Human League and Spandau Ballet. It’s all clean guitar, post-disco electronic rhythms, synth handclaps and yelped harmony vocals, but it badly lacks the precision of its influences: the timing isn’t as crisp as it needs to be and the vocal is a little too weak and out of tune to carry the songs. It’s early days for this band, though, and it could be just teething problems, though their self-applied label of “ambitionless office disco” does seem apt, and not in a good way. The songs themselves do drive forward quite nicely from time to time but it’s never very energetic, despite the best efforts of the animated percussionist, and like Chad Valley’s recent OX4 set the songs divide between borderline-euphoric pop meditations and rather turgid two-chord dirges with dry riffs. After a time it all feels pretty samey, and it’s easy to picture Trophy Wife as a cynical tour warm-up for Foals: the style is different enough to Foals’ fiery post-funk not to tread on their toes but the attitude is similar, and while it’ll get people in the mood, in terms of energy and precision there’s absolutely no risk of them upstaging the headliner.

Pet Moon, however, is a much more promising prospect. Former Youthmovie Andrew Mears’s new band’s first gig begins as many debut gigs do, rather shonkily, with the first couple of songs devilled by an appallingly muddy mix, but it clears up as the set progresses. On stage there are two large open suitcases on stands which appear to contain the tech toys used by the other two members of the band to create – or simply press ‘play’ on – what sounds like an electro backing track, while Mears leads on vocal and occasional guitar in an ambitious range of styles, as if testing the water to see what will work and what won’t. Falsetto vocal and double-tapping on the guitar don’t work so well, but harmony vocals and guitar interplay do, and the backing track of minimal industrial drums playing dubstep rhythms works really rather well indeed. When the guitars are in it sounds much more in thrall to the 80s – a friend pinpointing it as a cross between King Crimson and Tears For Fears. When the guitars are set aside and the electronics are given free rein, it’s potent stuff, rather like Volta-era Björk, with the soaring lead vocal being chopped on the fly by the electronics tinkerers while the rhythms pound in a hypnotic dubstep half-time. Pet Moon and Trophy Wife have some influences in common, for sure, but tonight’s headliners seem to be the exact opposite of “ambitionless office disco”, and are much better for it.

Trophy Wife / Pet Moon / Pindrop Performances / Blessing Force