Liz Allan’s powerful debut novel smells unmistakably like teen spirit. Plunging the reader into the cauldron of suburban malaise that is an Australian seaside resort in 1994, it is narrated collectively by the Bastards, a band of 14-year-old riot grrrls bringing Kurt Cobain’s gospel to their dead-end backwater – in their own eyes, at least. To their schoolmates, they are three fatherless losers, tainted by poverty.

But the Bastards don’t care; they’ve got a ticket out of Vincent, “capital of teen pregnancies and absent fathers”. For nine months, their beloved music teacher, Mr P, has been rehearsing them for the Battle of the Bands, a long drive away in the city of Geelong. Admittedly, they suffered a body blow when their lead singer, Lily Lucid, quit a year ago. But Mr P still believes in them.

Then word spreads that Lily has reported someone to the cops, and Mr P is suspended. Battle of the Bands is five weeks away and the girls need him behind the wheel of the van they’ve booked to get there. As their dream starts slipping through their fingers, they make it their mission to prove his innocence by identifying the real culprit of the sexual assault against Lily.

But they’re barely speaking to her. Through a tapestry of retrospective chapters, the preceding events come into focus: Lily’s victimisation by her mum’s boyfriend, Buddy, her withdrawal into schoolwork before leaving the band. The mystery drives the plot forward: why did they fall out, and what aren’t the Bastards revealing? Is Mr P the predator, or Buddy, whose chummy name only makes him more sinister?

The girls skateboard around town tracking suspects, scoring booze and crashing at each other’s houses. Their collective voice is an uncanny exercise in bravado, charged by the defiant spirit of grunge. “Kurt Cobain says that fitting in is for losers, so we’re proud to be freaks.” United, they are a citadel. You can’t even mock their missing fathers, since the band name gets there first. “The Bastards aren’t afraid of anything. Without fathers, we are free.” It is only when the unit fractures that we hear individual voices.

Allan, an Australian secondary school teacher living in the UK, who has won several short story prizes, taps her own experience in the novel. In Bloom highlights the cycle of deprivation and marginalisation: the more the Bastards are excluded, the more they rebel. Through their eyes, at once naive and precocious, we witness the trap of single motherhood; above all, they fear joining the “invisible girls with invisible children”. They have faint memories of the “milkshake days” before their own dads left. Now, bowed by domestic drudgery, their mothers prop up a succession of beer-swilling boyfriends. “It feels, most of the time, that we are too expensive to exist. Our mothers can’t afford us, and yet, there is always another little brother or sister on the way.”

With their rotting piers and drunken revellers, beach resorts are time-honoured backdrops for unnerving tales. Allan evokes Vincent in all its tawdry menace: shark-infested waters, creaking carnival rides, violent men lurking at home. Her chapters are distilled, her prose raw and vital, repetitions imbuing an incantatory rhythm. The Bastards are drolly blunt – a teacher “makes even mass murder sound boring” – and their metaphors piercing: “He smiles at us, sadly, like we are dogs that have to be put down.”

This is an electric portrait of teenage friendship and fandom, bubbling with rage and yearning: an Australian answer to Eliza Clark’s Penance and Dizz Tate’s Brutes. Although In Bloom is too accomplished to feel imitative, perhaps it echoes these books a little too closely, fitting clearly into that angsty subgenre spawned byJeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides. Nevertheless, it acutely traces the fault lines of poverty and alienation, showing how they expose vulnerable people to exploitation and how hard it is to speak out when you are usually ignored. Empathetic, addictive and feverish as a Nirvana gig, In Bloom critiques societal problems without patronising those affected by according them a fierce collective voice.

• In Bloom by Liz Allan is published by Sceptre (£16.99).