In the past 12 months, Confidence Man have become an unmistakable part of the Australian music scene. Boasting choreographed dance moves and tastefully synchronised costumes alongside their trademark infectious earworms, it's hard to imagine the band without their defining accoutrements, but, as vocalist Janet Planet recalls, the sound was always at the forefront.

"The music came first," says Planet firmly.

"We were all doing rock stuff initially and we were all living together, so we started writing this new stuff. It's part of all living together, all being young and all writing music together - that's where it came from."

Originally from the Sunshine State, the outfit is a product of the Brisbane music scene's penchant for supergroups, containing members from The Belligerents, Moses Gunn Collective and The Jungle Giants.

However, Confidence Man are far too clever to be slapped with the side-project label, adopting new personas (and in the case of band members Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie, apiarist hats and veils) to avoid being prematurely judged.

"I suppose the stage names were, essentially, because we were doing dance music as well. Having any integration between rock and dance is kind of frowned upon. In a way, we didn't want to mesh those two worlds and be seen as a rock band trying to write dance music or the other way around," Planet says.

"I think keeping that separate allowed us to make our own way instead of bouncing off the back of the other bands or being associated with those acts. That was kind of how that happened and now we're happier that we did that, we got away without looking like a side-project."

Going from gigging in front of a dozen people to selling out shows all over Australia was never the plan, though. It started as most great things do, with some good friends having fun.

"We've been friends for years and years. Reggie is my brother, too. We were all really close. That's the way we all are together; we never took ourselves too seriously, particularly writing dance music. We had never tried to write dance music before. Initially it was all a little bit of a joke, which is why it was so much fun.

"Slowly, as we began to write more and more we started to realise, 'Maybe this is really good.'"

From there, the Confidence Man train has taken off at full speed, landing them on international festival line-ups like The Governors Ball in New York and Primavera Sound in Spain. It's also led to their debut album, the highly anticipated Confident Music For Confident People - an LP that, like the band, is overflowing with ideas.

"The way we work is that we'll start writing and when we hit a roadblock we'll sit there and be really grumpy until we put it away and work on something else," Planet says. "So there's a bunch of half-finished songs that we just couldn't get to work. One of these songs we were really disappointed about, because it had the best chorus in the world but we could not do the verse. So we had this amazing chorus but nothing else.

"Maybe we should put out a mixtape of just all the good bits, 'cause we even have this one song that we really wanted on [the album], that has Clarence scatting and it's, like, the best 20-second scat of all time and we need it somewhere. So maybe we'll just do that," laughs Planet.

Scat or no scat, the album encapsulates everything that the band have been working towards: toe-tappingly good melodies and slapping bass lines enrobe tongue-in-cheek lyrics that playfully poke fun at everyone and everything. Case in point: the wickedly sharp and extremely danceable single Don't You Know I'm In A Band. "I suppose it's about people we know and, in a sense, about ourselves. Like, there are so many people I know that are like that. So it was just playing with that to a point of absurdity. Half of our friends must be like, 'Oh, no, did I say something or do something around them? Did they say that about me?'" Planet chuckles

This isn't even the most salacious insider goss on the album. That award goes to the innocuously titled COOL Party.

"There's a line in there that says, 'I even went to a party where a guy shoved a lightbulb up his ass', and that actually happened at Splendour 2017," Planet explains.

"I remember, it happened in the Tackle Shack, I was there with all the Northeast [Party House] guys and all of our friends. We were all taking pictures of this guy that had literally put a lightbulb up his ass and was dancing around; it was the craziest thing I've ever seen."

While last year's Splendour In The Grass might have provided valuable album material, it also led to the band's first taste of a backlash. Sparked by a live video and a suggestion that they were Australia's next big thing, what followed was a tidal wave of negative comments that attacked everything from the outfit's music to their members. However, Planet is firm that the reaction was a positive thing.

"Initially, I was a bit confused because I was like, 'We're doing everything silly and we're dancing and stuff, how can you not like that?'" Planet says. "Then I thought about it and I talked to some friends in the music industry as well, and it was like, if your band doesn't get the reaction of hating or really loving you then you're not doing the right thing. If you're mediocre, you're never going to get that response. Even if we garnered a negative reaction, it was still a reaction. We were doing art, in a way. I think that's really important: if you're not getting any backlash then there's never going to be people that really love you either."

Did the experience make the group rethink the way they conducted themselves? Not on your life. "We thought, 'Oh, we need to add more live elements,' and the more we talked about it [the more] we came to the realisation that the reason why we're different is that we actively chose not to do that, and that's what sets us apart. We set out to be different. What we need to do is [remember] that every time we get a negative reaction [we need] to think, 'The reason why that reaction is there is because we're different.' I think that's a good thing."

"We created it for people like ourselves, there was never any kind of thinking of strategy. Like, 'This is what we gotta do,' or thinking, 'Are we good enough?' That kind of honesty and lack of pretence is probably what draws people there. We're not trying to hide behind anything, we just created exactly what we wanted. I think that's why it connects so well: it's something that we wanted and other people got that."