The Naked & Famous

These five young Aucklanders have at their disposal a seemingly effortless ability to capture the giddy fun and relentless hooks one has come to expect from the very best electro-pop, while at the same time striving for something grander, more brooding and atmospheric. It’s this special proposition that has landed the band triumphant success on their native soil and has meant that containing their sounds to their homeland has been something of an impossibility.

Thom and Alisa met at music college in 2008 and formed a songwriting partnership that would become the life force of TNAF. Aaron, a high school acquaintance of Thom’s, was also studying at the same college and soon became a production foil to the duo as they toyed with song and recording ideas after hours in the college studio and various bedrooms. These eventually became The Naked And Famous’s first releases, the twin EPs No Light and This Machine.

'Passive Me, Aggressive You', the debut long-player from TNAF came together at scattered small studio locations around Auckland. Singles 'Young Blood' and 'Punching In A Dream' could well do for 3-D synth anthemia what 'Time To Pretend' and 'Kids' did for new psychedelia a few years back. On the record, at its most mountainous, the likes of vacant leviathan 'No Way' and urgent throbbing ascent 'Eyes' work a strange kind of magic. 'Jilted Lovers' wrestles with an unruly synthetic discordance in the vein of the group’s greatest shared and acknowledged influence Nine Inch Nails, while 'A Wolf In Geek's Clothing' takes that same stormy heart and cranks it to near doom-laden bulldozer effect. From fleeting soundscapes like 'The Source' to 'Spank's urgent swamping surge of glitches and fuzzed-out refrains, TNAF never shy away from deconstructing normal indie comfort zones. It stands proud, in a time of quick-fix singles culture, as a genuine album.

But anyone who's witnessed TNAF emerge from what they like to call their natural studio habitat to step onstage – where their songs become a truly enveloping experience – will testify to the sheer epic proportions of album closer 'Girls Like You'. Perhaps TNAF at their most realised, it is a complete collision of swooping, chanting hooklines and otherworldly expanses of sound. This is a band set to blow a crater in 2011’s musical landscape, a young group of warped sound merchants making do-or-die, heart-in-mouth, chart-bound pop to invest your heart and soul in.