Few indie newcomers would have the nerve to co-opt a seminal song by pop’s biggest band to kick off a show. But as Catfish and the Bottlemen take to a white strobe-emblazoned stage with the thundering strains of the Beatles’ Helter Skelter blaring around them, it’s just another step in their Oasis-inspired master plan.

Having recently won a Brit award for British breakthrough act and with the release of their second album, The Ride, just a month away, Catfish and the Bottlemen are on a high. Their overwhelmingly teenage fanbase sing, scream and mosh as if every moment is their last and frontman Van McCann is more than happy to play up to the adulation. In between staggering around and wrestling with his guitar, McCann routinely offers up the vocal duties to the crowd, throwing his head back skywards as they roar each word of debut album gems Homesick and Pacifier back at him. Even his solo acoustic moment, Hourglass, is shared with the masses.

McCann and co have spent nine years toiling for success, and their waltzer-indie – scream-if-you-wanna-go-faster refrains set against a dizzying wall of guitars and adrenalised rhythms – is tailor-made to inspire such heady appreciation. But the band can get lost amid the ardour. As each ode to messy nights with even messier girls blurs into the next, there’s little sense of personality, and no between-song banter to keep the atmosphere alive. Instead, the Llandudno-spawned quartet are often buried under the adulation.

A clutch of new numbers, however, give the fans a breather and offer a tantalising glimpse of a darker, more refined direction for Catfish: Anything is a slow-burning Britpop stomp; Red has more edge and so far untapped reserves of soul; 7 owes much of its affable hummability to the Kooks, but it’s equally suffused with Catfish’s stadium ambitions. If they can hold the nerve they’ve displayed so far, they’ll get there.

• At Liverpool Sound City festival on 28 May.