“Growing up, I listened to a lot of the stuff that influenced this second album in particular,” Dave recalls. “A lot of 80s pop really, like Robert Palmer, Hall & Oates, A-Ha, Billy Ocean, Huey Lewis…that was when I was really young, and after that I discovered classic rock and then I got into hip-hop and all sorts of different things. The earliest memories I have of music are this first generation pop that I heard on MTV, and it would fascinate me. Pee Thug is a Lebanese immigrant, so in fact all this pop stuff – he never knew it. He got to Canada when Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ came out. He didn’t really listen to music until he got ‘Bad’. So all this Hall & Oates shit,is new to him. As teenagers, when we started discovering the stuff we really liked and wanted to identify ourselves with, he was definitely more into the P-Funk stuff, and I would bring more of the loverboy songwriter thing.”

Billy Ocean?! As much as it sounds like Dave’s taking the piss, the endearing – and enduring – thing about this band is that they aren’t. At all. In fact, they’re deadly fucking serious about the music they’re making. Let’s indulge the moustachioed frontman with a little nostalgia, as he takes us back to mid-80s Montreal…

“When I was 7, I thought Billy Ocean was the coolest guy on the planet! I wanted to be him. And now I think Rick James is the coolest guy on the planet. I guess it’s sincere – when Snoop and Dre did ‘Doggystyle’, all they listened to all day was Cameo and they thought “let’s do our version of that”. And it just so happened that they rapped and that’s what they did. And we’re just trying to do our take on that kind of stuff.”

As for the rest of the scene, it seems just now that everyone wants to get a Moog and surround themselves with the infinite possibilities of synthesised music. As well as the techno-derived likes of the aforementioned Justice et al making waves in 2007, there is the bubblegum pop of Calvin Harris and New Young Pony Club, the dark electro-pop of The Knife, the enduring dance-punk of LCD Soundsystem and the classy bedroom majesty of Chromeo’s fellow Canadians Junior Boys. After five years at the start of the decade where it seemed few wanted to know unless you were skinny, artfully dishevelled and wielding a guitar, the public is ready for synths and keyboards again. Happily enough for Chromeo, it’s come at exactly the right time.

“Don’t forget this is our second album – when our first album came out nobody was doing shit like that,” Dave insists. “The only records that could have been put in the same category as us when our first album came out were Les Rhythmes Digitales and Daft Punk’s ‘Discovery’. Those were the records that pushed us to do Chromeo. Especially ‘Discovery’ – that one still sets the standard. If that record came out tomorrow it would still crush everything that’s out there. Y’know, let’s keep things in perspective.”

Although Dave may hold up Daft Punk as the pinnacle, it is quite clear from talking to him that he doesn’t see his own band as being a million miles away in terms of musical possibilities. This music might be amusing and it might even seem disposable but to Dave and Pee, making us have a good time is a serious business.

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