English three-piece The Wombats make cute, fun, and totally sugary pop music. They are nothing like the mammal from which they take their name – wombats are squat, ugly, and vicious little blighters.

Frontman Murph admitted, upon the band’s recent visit to Australia, that he’s yet to encounter the marsupial…and he reckons he’d like it to stay that way.

“We were trying to fit it in,” he admits, but they just never got around to it. “We’re thinking maybe it’s best that we don’t get to meet one – just keep that there.”

Of the name of the band, he explains, it came from he and drummer Dan Haggis having a love of strange animals, and they used the ‘wombat’ as a substitute for ‘idiot’. “It was between me and Dan, really,” he says of the in-joke, “and then we didn’t have a name for our first gig and so he said ‘let’s just call ourselves the Wombats’, and that was that really.”

The band open their debut album, Boys, Girls and Marsupials, with the title track, greeting the listener with the sound of perfectly in-sync doo-wop. With the advent (and arguable advantage) of computer technology to fix any errors that occur in the recording, Murph says that the band were keen to avoid doing so, instead electing to keep things organic, but understood that occasionally corrections need to be made.

“We just concentrate on getting as much energy in the track as possible,” he says of the band’s recording technique, “and if it means cutting between two tracks and getting the best part then we’re fine with that. You can’t tell – but it is the hardest part of having so many instruments that you can put on top.”

The band had their genesis at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, an off-shot of the famous Brit School, which has spawned the likes of Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash, the Kooks, Adele, and the like. Murph hopes (seemingly against hope) that the Liverpool version won’t morph into the factory-like producer of new talent that the London version has become.

“I’m all for bands coming out of shitty neighbourhoods,” he sniffs. “For me [going to the School] was a way to be in a band and not have to hold down a job in a supermarket or whatever. We could scrounge off the government and get pissed and come out of it with a degree. We just abused the facility’s really.”

Given that, how do you view the Brit School’s ability to spawn so many hit-makers at the moment? Is it in danger of losing the heart of what music is about, and the purity will be lost?

“I don’t understand what takes the heart out of it by going to a performing arts place,” he counters. “The performing arts places are almost like little magnets that draw performers, and artists, and musicians – most artists are pretty insecure beings and they don’t know what they want to do with life, and that’s just a way to go and find themselves and work out exactly what it is that they want to do. I don’t think it takes any soul away from the music – although I’m not a big fan of a lot of the stuff that has come out of the Brit School to be honest.”

Murph always knew he wanted to be a songwriter – so going to LIPA made perfect sense for him. “I knew that was where my interested lay, but I didn’t know if I was going to be able to be in a band for an actual living. Somehow I’ve managed to pull it off!”

The standout factor of The Wombats’ debut album is, indeed, the songwriting – they have a remarkable gift for delivering little pop gems throughout, with only “Little Miss Pipedream” and the like bringing down the positive and pop attitude that permeates the release.

“I never think about what I want to write,” he muses, “but it’s just the mood I was in for this album – all the songs were like therapy for me and when I go to the band it’s often quite a miserable, dark song with a bit if humour in it and they just add all this sunshine.”

The Wombats’ debut album is available now through Warner Music.