“Ugh, we’re really going to have to go because the airport security are telling us to move through, and the lady is getting mad. I think they think we might be terrorists,” Melissa Livaudais tells me urgently.

Waiting at the airport with Busy Gangnes, the diminutive duo might have every hipster coveting their footwear and poker-faced nonchalance, but they couldn’t cut a less threatening figure if they tried. En route to São Paulo for their first Brazilian tour as avant-pop buzz-band Telepathe, the pair plan to take advantage of their situation. “I’ve never been before,” Livaudais declares. “I can’t fucking wait. I’m going to party – Brazilian style.”

But things haven’t always been beach parties and caipirinhas for Telepathe. With the release last February of Dance Mother, their ground-breaking debut album, the Brooklyn girls experienced first-hand just how much of a man’s world the music business can be. Case in point – the controversy-courting Pitchfork’s snide insinuation that Gangnes and Livaudais were a front with “questionable” musical abilities, crediting the anxious elegance of Dance Mother to a handful of well-known producers – all of which were male.

“It happens all the time,” Livaudias sighs. “People think we didn’t write our own music, that a man created it. It’s that whole concept that there’s a man behind everything we do. But we wrote it, composed it, arranged it. David Sitek produced it, which was amazing, but we wrote all of it. People just assume – because people write music for Britney Spears.”

I trod carefully where Sitek was mentioned, as in the past too much has been made of his involvement with Dance Mother, sometimes to the detriment of Telepathe’s credibility. But to have secured the expertise of the TV and the Radio guitarist – whose production credits include Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Foals and Liars albums – the girls have obviously known what they’re doing all along.

“Working with him was a huge learning process. We have a home studio and started using software, mixing the songs ourselves, but the songs were in a pretty rough shape. So we brought them to Dave, and he made it sound tremendous. He just has these random, crazy – in a good way – creative ideas for making the music sound really expansive,” Livaudais gushes.

Not to take away from the input Busy’s tabby cat, Alice, had even before Sitek got his hands on it. “She hangs around the studio all the time; she’s really cute. We have this space where she’ll sit right next to the monitor, which is weird ‘cause it’s really loud music. But we figure that’s kind of like a sign of her approval, that she likes what we’ve done. It’s how we know we must be doing something right.”

With its kaleidoscopic blend of perfectly-synchronised vocals, haunting synths and unusual melodies set against a suitably dark backdrop of skipping dubstep beats, Dance Mother is a breath of fresh air. It’s also disarmingly addictive, a product of Telepathe’s endeavour to “re-invent” pop music and achieve pioneer status with their distinctive sound.

I ask Livaudais if she feels they achieved this with Dance Mother and she’s modestly hesitant. “Um, I think yes and no. I don’t think it reached that level really. I had really high expectations with the album and it didn’t really happen, but at the same time some really cool things came from it.

“Like Julian Casablancas from The Strokes is a fan and has asked us to tour with him which is really cool, especially considering he comes from a very different, rock background. I think some people see us as pioneers and some probably just see us as creeps, I don’t know.”

No sooner had I laughed off the idea of anyone thinking Telepathe were a pair of creeps than she tells me about the time her and Gangnes played the role of crazed fans. It happened when their dressing room ended up dangerously close to that of Karin Dreijer Andersson, aka Fever Ray.

“We’re kind of obsessed with her,” Livaudais confesses. “When we were on the festival circuit we got to see her play and all the artists’ dressing rooms were sort of crammed together backstage, and we actually left her a note in her dressing room. We’re like, – œWe love you, you’re such a great inspiration, please keep making music forever.’ And we put like a lipstick kiss on it or something too. She must have thought we were like stalkers or something.”

Telepathe will play the Peats Ridge and Pyramid Rock festivals over this coming New Years Eve period.

Tuesday, December 29 – The Evelyn Hotel, Melbourne (with Ponytail)
Wednesday December 30 – Pyramid Rock Festival, Phillip Island
Thursday December 31 – Peats Ridge Festival, Glenworth Valley