Ladytron are setting trends, but don’t tell them.

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Ask Ladytron’s Danny Hunt if he sees his band as part of a retro-futurist, synthcore scene and you can bet on an emphatic reply: “We’re about songs. We’re not just churning out electronic club tunes,” he says. So that’s a “no” then.

Over the summer, the Liverpool boy-girl-boy-girl electropop quartet have become unwilling trendsetters. First hailed as fashion icons, thanks to their monochrome uniforms and impish haircuts (“Hair - what is it? It’s just hair. It’s not important!” says Danny, exasperated). And then, hailed as godfathers of the season’s 80s-inspired electroclash revival (spearheaded by pop pretenders Fischerspooner) that gripped London’s style-obsessed East End.

The fact is, Ladytron have been making their steel-cool, synth-driven, St Etienne-tinged, New-Order-meets-Kraftwerk space gems since 1998. And the comparison gets up Danny’s nose: “We’ve made two albums in the time the people we’re being compared to have made two tracks. We’re musically different. With us, there wasn’t a plan. Our sound was based on the gear we had – tons of analogue gear, half of it nicked - more than an attempt to replicate any particular sound,” he says.

“We’ve avoided things that could’ve defined us,” he continues. “If we wanted to be opportunist, we could have put Seventeen [slick current single] out in May.” Instead, Ladytron spent the summer recording their second album, Light And Magic. Not in en vogue digital Mecca, Berlin, but in sunny, surreal LA. “In the north-west of England our songs fit in context, but in the sun they sound completely different. It was interesting to build on that,” he explains.

Dark yet glistening, urgent yet lush, Light And Magic sounds like it was recorded in a parallel universe - but one off Alpha Centauri, not La La Land. It’s not synthcore, it’s not retro-futurist. And it’s not part of what Danny calls “a half-arsed movement. We hear what we do as pop music.” Alexia Loundras 21 November 02

Seventeen, released 25 November 02.

Light and Magic, released 02 December 02 on Telstar records.