Imagine if one of the greatest pop bands of the 21st Century had never made it. Imagine if they were never signed by a record label. Imagine if they had never released an album. Imagine if they had a whole archive of songs that no-one had ever heard.

At the end of the last decade in which pop music really meant something, a heady and debauched time now appropriately referred to as ‘the noughties’, there was one band on every A&R man’s lips – a band who, improbably, hailed from the sleepy rural city of Hereford on the Welsh border.

Brandon Steep had evolved from a Radiohead-inspired college band, through a brooding Joy Division phase to arrive at a pastoral, folk-inspired indiepop sound, catching the ear of the late great John Peel. But it was their final incarnation that really got the record executives salivating…

At some point in 2008, the band (Norman Nouvelle, John Paul Baron, Glen Roberts, Pedro Kirk and Gregory Bishop) took one final seismic stylistic shift and, virtually overnight, transformed into a shiny pop beast, seemingly ‘steeped’ in the pristine, superbly-crafted, early 80s new-wave sound of bands like XTC, Haircut 100 and Aztec Camera - though the group insisted they had never even heard these bands until after the comparisons began to be made!

Along with the new sound came a new name. They chose a name that stayed true to the cider-making traditions of their rural home, whilst alluding to the crisp freshness of their new pop sound: Apples.

National tours, festival appearances and recording sessions with some of the UK’s best producers followed. In 2009 they signed a publishing deal with Universal, to whom an inebriated Norm gave his assurances that they had nothing to worry about as the band were “shitting out singles”. It would have been an arrogant comment were it not 100% the truth. A single, Reason 45, was released the same year and immediately became 6 Music Single of the Week and Q Magazine Track of the Day. Next year’s follow up release, Theo, became an earworm for gamers all over the globe when it featured on Pro Evolution Soccer 2011.

And then, on the eve of a make-or-break European tour, Norm left. The public perception of Apples as an 'overnight sensation' did not take into account the decade of hard work and heartbreak that had preceded this moment in the sun and slowly but surely taken its toll. With Norm’s blessing they took on a new singer, Jack Hughes, but the momentum had been lost and the moment had passed.

The band went their separate ways and a hard drive full of some of the most joyous, heart-felt and danceable guitar pop recorded this millennium was left to gather dust.

Until now.

The history of popular music is full of stories of great lost albums - ‘Smile’ by The Beach Boys, ‘The Black Album’ by Prince. This is not a lost album. The truth is, Apples never made an album. This is a love letter to a lost band. This is a document of what could have been. This is putting things right. This is the debut album they never got to release, even though the recordings contained on it were never intended for that purpose. Some of them were recorded at top of the range studios with some of the best British producers of the era. Others were recorded as demos by the band themselves in their homes. But all of the music is timeless in the way that the greatest pop is.

This is your new favourite band.

Finally, after ten long years, this is Apples.