We’ve got The Jezabels too! Read what Australia’s electrorock ‘band of the moment’ have got to say, ahead of their Asian tour with The People’s Party here.

Talk to any Metronomy fan and they’ll likely wax lyrical about the light-whacking ‘Metronomy 2.0’ live shows. Or maybe they’ll enthuse about the beautiful auburn-haired drummer and her ‘metronomic’ beats. Or perhaps you’ll hear The English Riviera fondly praised by those who’ve lived in seaside towns they forgot to close down, just as songwriter Joe Mount once had. Or just maybe, you’ll hear how, three years earlier, Metronomy looked and sounded very different.

Back then, there was Mount (vocals, guitar), Gabriel Stebbing (keyboards and bass guitar) and Oscar Cash (keyboards, melodica and saxophone) – a trio of bearded electronica pushers known for their insane light-and-sound shows. But in 2009, it all changed. Bassist Gbenga Adelekan and drummer Anna Prior (former Lightspeed Champion member) were drafted, while Stebbing left to form his own band.

To their fans, it heralded a landmark in the band’s life. But to Metronomy, it wasn’t so much of a sea-change as a shifting of the sands in a direction Mount had already glimpsed on the horizon. “It didn’t feel like a relaunch because we were already promoting Nights Out,” says Adelekan over the phone in his deep Brit-Nigerian inflected voice. “Joe always felt like he was borrowing Gabriel – he knew that he would go back to his own music.”

That reshuffle all went down just after the release of Nights Out. But since then the quartet have released their third album, The English Riviera. It’s had huge success and you could say Metronomy is now fully formed both musically and aesthetically. The album is like an ode to Mount’s childhood seaside memories – much mellower than Metronomy’s dancefloor electro-beats of their early years – with distant seagull caws and organ pipe chords scattered across the 11 tracks. “Joe actually grew up in that part of England, near Torquay,” says Adelekan, telling the story behind Metronomy’s third Mercury Award-nominated album. “All of the cultural stuff and music was coming from London or Manchester, so people who grew up in these towns always thought they were kind of dead. The English Riviera is partly about wanting to leave but once you’ve left being nostalgic for the place that you were when you were younger.”

With songs like The Bay, We Broke Free and the title track, one might presume the seaside theme was born purely out of nostalgia. Not so, says Adelekan. “Joe likes to have a theme that he can hang a record on, lyrically,” he states. “What we associate with the great studio album are albums from the 70s, the golden era of going into the studio and using the first electronic studio stuff. So we married that sound to the lyrical aesthetic about being nostalgic.”

Of course, not even Metronomy can live in the past forever, and as Adelekan reveals, 2012 should give fans something to look forward to: a new album. “We’ve jammed a few things but I definitely don’t think we’re now going to become a 70s sounding rock band or anything,” he says. “The next album isn’t really going to sound like this one.”

Ysabelle Cheung 

Metronomy + The Naked & Famous + The Jezabels play KITEC on Tuesday January 10. Tickets: 3128 8288; hkticketing.com

Photo: Gregoire Alexandre