quad throw salchow

The lineup: K Doyle (bass), JG Drake (synthesiser), O (singer, lyricist).

The background: You know how movies and TV shows love the capsule pitch, the one-line sell? Well, if we were trying to encourage a record company to take an interest in today's new band with a few pithy words, we might describe them as "Joy Division fronted by the Blair Witch". Because that's the impression we get from their gloomy disco rumble, their trebly, throbbing basslines and primitive machine pulsebeats, and the overall atmosphere of cold noir-ish menace provided by enigmatic frontwoman O's eerie croak, a voice that makes her sound like the "star" of the aforementioned forest chiller. At the very least, think Marianne Faithfull circa Broken English breaking into the studio as Throbbing Gristle recorded 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

They're all about preserving a sense of mystery and keeping their identities hidden in this overlit, overexposing FaceSpace, Twitter age. Hence their use of unrevealing, blank, pseudo-anonymous names and shrouded, shadowy press photos. Internet videos of the trio comprise a series of silhouetted shapes materialising then disappearing just as rapidly back into the darkness, while reports of their live shows are of the vague, nebulous variety: hushed, awestruck dispatches from the lips of a select minority of converts and disciples.

We know a little about them. Their name comes from a "fiendishly difficult ice-skating move", involving four turns in the air and a jump, as perfected by one-time Swedish ice-skating champion Ulrich Salchow his image from the 1908 Olympics adorns the band's MySpace, although neither Doyle, Drake or O have any knowledge of the sport beyond that, nor do they harbour intentions of one day becoming entrants on a show called Celebrity Dancing On Frozen Tundra. Their self-titled debut album was put together in a former bake-house turned studio in a suburb of London, each track starting as a sequence of synth fragments and bass blips transmitted from one mobile phone to another. The lyrics, meanwhile, come to O "from the ether", from the Surrealists or French philosophers such as Sartre and Camus. But they're not pretentious; you could rarely say of O that She Lost Control. The titles of the songs are simple and to the point: Speed, Matters of the Mind, Fate Will Find You, The Game is On. There is a sense of mild urgency, which is reflected by the chiselled precision and nervy edge of the music, a monochrome mix of post-punk, electronica, krautrock and, oddly, club music. "There's a dance element," they say, breaking cover briefly to explain what they do before withdrawing into the night. "We were once called 'electronic-pop noir', and that was close. There are some weird angles and dark sides, but the groove is always there."

The buzz: "Imagine Suicide breaking into Studio 54 to see Ikara Colt laying down a track for Best Driving Anthems Ever next door to Kraftwerk reading up on Hacienda-era Manchester while Edith Piaf duets with David Bowie."

The truth: If you like the idea of blood-curdling croaks and shrieks set to dubby electronic rock, QTS are for you.

Most likely to: Sound scary in a wood.

Least likely to: Overly impress Holly Willoughby.

What to buy: The single Chrome September is out now on TummyTouch, followed by the debut album on 17 August.

File next to: Joy Division, Colder, Suicide, Marianne Faithfull.

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