Delphic

Delphic are just about the coolest band in the universe right at this moment. They've turned the UK on its ear with their debut album, Acolyte, which is filled to the brim with catchy-as-all-get-out tracks like the single 'Clarion Call'. The band are also signed to Sydney's hippest label, Modular. So it's a pleasant surprise to discover that guitarist/keyboardist Matt Cocksedge has been spending his time doing something distinctly uncool: playing arcade games.

"We've had a day off in Brighton today," he enthusiastically explains. "We played a couple of games of Time Crisis at the arcade – you know, the shooting game? It was awesome! I really enjoyed it! It was cracking mate, it took me right back!"

While Cocksedge doesn't have access to an arcade of his own, there's a genuine wistfulness in his voice as he discusses his Xbox 360. "I just got FIFA and Call of Duty 2 and basically lost any resemblance of a social life I had."

Then again, does one's social life offer the dizzy thrills of premiership soccer, or gunning down terrorists in cold blood? Rarely, if ever.

"I'm glad you empathise, mate," he laughs. "It's nice after you've been busy and active and all over the place to sit down, switch off and shoot some motherfuckers. There you go. Delphic: promoting massacre worldwide."

When they're not engaged in a brutal reign of global terror, the trio mix a heady blend of urgent indie guitar with rich electronic beats. The former comes from the members' apprenticeship in indie bands; the latter from the decision to write on laptops.

"The whole thing was born out of wanting to do things a different way and wanting to impose rules on ourselves in order to create something we otherwise wouldn't have come up with," he explains. "Leaving the guitar and real drums to the very end definitely switched the sections of the songs and the way we wrote them – in that way it was beneficial; it forced us to think from a different perspective.

"Me and Rick [Richard Boardman] had been in bands since school doing this and that, taking apart synthesisers, playing around with guitars and delay pedals. We were 16 and trying to write Godspeed You Black Emperor tunes," he chuckles. "Then we got into bands like Radiohead and wrote more guitar-based music but we got really sick of it. We had a tongue-in-cheek saying at the start of the band: ‘the guitar is dead, long live the guitar.' We want to avoid the clichés of guitar music as we saw it at that time, which was really derivative, monotonous and just boring. With the shift of indie music into the mainstream in recent years, it's become really homogenised. It was indie for masses and didn't have soul in it anymore."

Oh, come on: the kids love the Fratellis!

"That's cool – the kids can love the Fratellis but they also have to understand that we don't," he states, before laughing. "There's room in the world for the Fratellis and Delphic – I think we can all happily co-exist." Andrew P Street

Acolyte is out now through Modular/Universal.