Their debut could be the Da Vinci Code of albums, but These New Puritans love being inscrutable. Jack Barnett tells Jim Carrollwhy the band from the deepest swamps of Southend like leaving listeners scratching their heads.

LONG before they took up their instruments in anger, These New Puritans knew just what kind of a band they were going to be. The Barnett brothers, Jack and George, had already talked, dreamed, critiqued and mythologised their band many times over while growing up in Southend.

"We had been making music together since we were young, but we never played in other bands," says TNP singer Jack. "For as long as I can remember, me and George have been making imaginary music together. We had all the ideas, so we imagined what our band could be like. TNP were the first such band to become real."

Their big dreams paid off. Beat Pyramid, These New Puritans' debut album, is one of the season's most exciting new releases. Angular post-punk glitches, inscrutable, coded lyrical conspiracies and an obsessive aspiration to create something different come gloriously to fruition on the album. No wonder so many talent tipsters see 2008 as a Puritanical year.

It's their lyrical notions more than anything else that mark TNP out as the odd ones in the pack. Too many years spent putting up with acts where the sneer has become a substitute for substance means we've become a little inured to how dire the modern rock discourse can be. At first you don't know how to react when confronted with songs about medieval numerology (Numbers) and terrorist cells kidnapping journalists (Swords of Truth).

"I've found that people are afraid of ideas and seem to regard having ideas as being pretentious in some way," says Barnett. "But surely just being in a band in the first place is pretentious? Getting together and making up a name for yourselves is the most pretentious thing you can do. So, if you're in a band, you should take it to the next level and not be afraid of ideas.

"People accuse us of being 'intellectual'. We're always surprised at that charge and even the fact that there is a charge. It goes back to that thing about a fear of ideas. I suppose we're well-informed, as opposed to well-read, and the ideas we like to use as themes for our music don't necessarily belong together."

Jack Barnett has previously cited Staten Island hip-hoppers Wu-Tang Clan (an act who can also toe a mean line in theories and mythology themselves) as an influence. "What I like about them is that their music has so much friction in it. They're also very direct and we definitely took that idea from them."

He's also happy to point to how much TNP took from "diverse stuff like dancehall and industrial and '90s electronica," and fondly recalls seeing Captain Beefheart on TV when Jack was nine years old. ("I saw him and I was hooked. I didn't know what to make of him.")

Still, in terms of his peers, Barnett adheres to the logic that if you've nothing good to say, say nothing. "I don't want to say other bands are crap because people will think we're being arrogant. OK, we are a bit arrogant because we ignore everyone else and concentrate on what we do."

He feels that Southend has had a lot to do with how his band sound and operate. The London exurb, a one-time centre for British pub-rock, didn't see many bands come calling when the Barnetts were growing up.

"Southend is in the shadow of London and is a bit of a refuge from London," Jack says. "No bands would come to town, so that was another reason why we had to invent stuff for ourselves.

"The town has a bit of a strange atmosphere to it because it used to be marshland and was apparently infested with malaria. There's a tale that the average man in Southend a hundred years ago used to have 20 wives, and they just had to import more and more women."

The singer calls Southend "a murky place" and firmly believes it's had a similar effect on their music. "That sense of mystery you find in our music is a product of what we're like because of where we're from. It's not intentional because there's a big gap between what we do and how we explain it. Too many bands get caught up in trying to explain what they do and the science behind it all. We prefer to let it be seen as a magic trick."

That explanation for their art is becoming tougher to pass off with every round of interviews.

"Interviews are hard because I don't deliberately set out to deceive people," he says. "It's just what we've done has been so instinctive that trying to explain it often seems like deciphering a code. Some bands go on about how it's just about the music but, with us, I think there's something else which we can't get at that makes us the band we are." He pauses. "I'm sure that makes us sound even more pretentious than before."

These New Puritans play Dublin's Crawdaddy on February 20th. Beat Pyramid is out now on Domino Records. Listen at www.myspace.com/ thesenewpuritans