Chew Lips’ lead singer Tigs is practicing her Spanish on me. “Mi padre es de Granada, pero vivo en Inglaterra toda mi vida”, she tells me as she loiters on the platform at Liverpool Street in the January thaw. Real name Alicia Huertas, 26 she is at the head of a band that has enjoyed a nigh on vertical trajectory since forming two years ago.
Too much, too soon, is something that the Lips have handled with an aplomb beyond their years – their fifteenth ever gig, Tigs tells me, was the Electric Proms.
In his excoriating Band of the Day column for the Guardian, Paul Lester filed them next to La Roux and Little Boots, and a second listen to Salt Air does suggest some parallels with La Roux’s Bullet Proof; Lies! says Tigs, explaining how their album, which was launched this Tuesday, has a less trashy, less adolescent, slicker sound.
And there was me liking their demo stuff. “We’ve got Dave Kosten (Bat for Lashes) producing, and we think it will sound more accomplished. Back with our early stuff we were still working out what we wanted to be. We like classic stuff, like Prince and Scritti Politti, we want the album to be like stuff that gets sampled twenty years later.”
Major label attention from a young age (they are in fact signed to Kitsune) is something Tigs in particular was already comfortable with – she had a previous career as plain ‘Tigs’ signed on Polydor, and had an album produced by the might Flood (Depeche Mode, Sigur Ros). That didn’t work out, and she ended up playing her album to James Watkins, her future band partner.
“He heard it, and wasn’t convinced. I think he thought it was too poppy. He’s always been really alternative. Then we saw each other soon after, and he asked me if I wanted to be in a band! And after his reaction I was like ‘umm…maybe..’” Watkins’ influence can be said to have underlain the sound of some of Unicorn, their highly-billed (glowing BBC and NME reviews) debut album. Tracks Eight and Gold Key are defined by their slate, dour tones as the Lips shed the glossy carapace of happy happy synth pop.
“If there’s an eighties aesthetic we resemble, it would be the dark industrial ones [think Cabaret Voltaire and the Fall]. I think because there is this whole synth thing going on, everyone that uses synths gets lumped into the eighties bracket. You can’t lump every guitar band into one section either. it’s really fucking lazy of journalists to do that.
“There are always going to be people who don’t like our new [album] sound. We had a few shows last year where we’d give away singles, all with individual art work, and the next day we’d always have this guy writing on our MySpace, saying ‘With this new stuff you’ve lost all the beauty of what you originally were….when are you coming to Germany??’ This guy isn’t supposed to fucking like us!” she laughs.
Tigs seems too chirpy, too unrestrained, to be at the head of a moody aesthetic [in the vein of current eighties-retro doom and gloomers The Detachments]: maybe there’s a sediment of Andalucian violence in her belly to fire Unicorn’s dark side.
The hype that accompanied Chew Lips can, acknowledges Tigs, accrue suspicion; ["I hope people can see beyond that fact that we're a hyped band, I hope people with experience can ignore that"] it does have huge pluses though. Salt Air, their catchy hues-of-Blondie single, was given a promo video by the cartoonist Man vs Magnet and went straight to number 1 most-watched on YouTube.
The fact that they booked in their first ever show without having written any songs can leave them looking naive and superficial. On the flip, it also shows a devastating confidence that has paved their way into critics’ and fans’ laptop libraries over the last two years.
Chew Lips’ live performances are not to be missed as the lead lyricist injects the stage and pit with kilowatt diodes that sweetens the pill of dodgy the production values. Their January 2010 tour passed through KOKO on the  22nd for their Club NME gig. They peak in Texas in March – where it’s as yet unconfirmed whether the crowd will be chanting lyrics back to Tigs as she sings, like they did in Amsterdam – but rest assured this band is big and colonizing fast.

Got something constructive to say?