“Our story begins in the East Wing of Wesley Hospital / It's our young hero's local emergency centre / And it's here that we find the boy in a coma on the sofa in room 6B.” So begins “INTRO,” the opening track from Girl and Girl's debut album. Lyrically, the opening is a bold choice to draw the listener in – it could easily have veered into amateur theatre or “Once Upon a Time” territory – but here, Kai James' overt framing of the album functions as a kind of meta-literary device, immediately establishing its characters and concepts (namely himself and his own mental illness) with the narrative flair of fellow Australian Courtney Barnett. In fact, over the course of the next ten songs, it feels as if it's been transplanted directly into James' frontal lobe. On the title track, “Call A Doctor,” Auntie Liss's light-hearted beatkeeping evokes a racing heartbeat. On the soaring, epic “Maple Jean and the Anthropocene,” his vibrato-laden vocals convey a tremulous vulnerability; on “Hello,” a lyric sample from The Sound of Music's “So Long, Farewell” rings out as almost desperate gallows humor. Instrumentally, Girl and Girl recalls 2010s garage rock stalwarts (Parquet Courts, Car Seat Headrest, etc.). Its affinity with jazzy guitars and lilting rhythms is undercut by the frenetic intensity of the playing and a sense of saccharine claustrophobia in the tracks' dense arrangements (“Oh Boy!”, “Mother”). This textural closeness means that by the time you reach the slower cuts that change the pace (such as the Joanna Sternberg-reminiscent “Comfortable Friends”), you can't help but feel a bit chest-wrenching, but Call the Doctor is also an immersive piece of work. By the cycle-closing track, “OUTRO,” it’s unclear whether we’ve even left the East Wing of Wesley Hospital.