The Jet Set

Sydney cult crossover band Rüfüs could yet have the soundtrack for the summer with their debut album Atlas. The lookalike trio will be performing their slinky deep house at key events this season, starting with Listen Out, Parklife's successor. Fans should catch them while they can: Rüfüs have global ambitions.

Rüfüs were signed by electro DJ and Bang Gang co-founder Ajax (aka Adrian Thomas) to his five-year-old label Sweat It Out!, which enjoyed an international hit with Yolanda Be Cool and DCup's We No Speak Americano. Tragically, Thomas died in a traffic incident in February. Rüfüs have dedicated Atlas to him. “He definitely made it all happen,” Jon George (synths, keys and pads) says.

Though Rüfüs have a loyal following, and many know their tunes, the outfit's background is shadowy. As George tells it, Rüfüs had its genesis up north in 2010. It was here he bonded with Tyrone Lindqvist (vocals, guitar and keys). “I was finishing my sound engineering degree up in Byron Bay a few years ago now. Tyrone is best mates with my little brother and he came up to visit us right towards the end of my degree. I was helping him record some of his acoustic stuff, and he was helping me with some of my dancier productions. We spent one night in together – everyone else in the house had money to go out and we didn't – so we ended up writing the first track together as Rüfüs.” On George's return to Sydney, the pair took the project “a little bit more seriously”. And they recruited James Hunt. “We poached him from another band as our drummer,” George reveals. “Tyrone and James went to the same school together.”

Rüfüs – so DIY as to construct their own studios – premiered with a self-titled EP, home to the popular Paris Collides, on their Monekeleon imprint. Rüfüs generated interest overseas, with Talk To Me finding its way onto 2012's Gildas & Jerry Kitsuné Soleil Mix.

Having aired EPs, Rüfüs set about hustling for an album deal and this brought them into the orbit of Sweat It Out!. “We were looking for some people who were on the same page as us, that were after the same things, and that could help us go in a direction that we wanted to.” George had long admired Thomas. “He was such a big influence on me in particular. Like, when I first started going out, I was going to Bang Gang and that's what got me into dance music.” They'd meet with the DJ, who became “a huge believer”. “Unfortunately, just after we'd signed the deal, and we'd spoken so much about what we were all gonna achieve together, Ajax passed away – which was pretty massive emotion-wise for us right in the middle of writing this album, [but] inspired us to actually make it better and really push what we were doing, because of how much he believed in us and because of a lot of feedback that he'd given us on tracks already.”

Together with Modular Recordings' Steve Pavlovic, Thomas pioneered indie dance in Australia. But, if Rüfüs are indie dance, they're on the margins of it. “We've always sort of been under an indie-dance umbrella,” George ponders. “Particularly with our live show, we've got drums on stage and guitars, but we've also got a real electronic element to our sound and that's what puts us in that umbrella. But I think that in Australia we're certainly trying to bring a deeper element, rather than just indie disco. I feel like we're just nutting out that sound for ourselves and it's a sound that really turned us on. We really like those deeper sounds and we've really been trying to push that on the album.” Clubfeet may replicate '80s synth pop, but Rüfüs reference retro Balearica, house and techno, being Antipodean cousins of Hot Chip or Junior Boys – in fact, their Atlas song Take Me mines the same Chicago house nostalgia as Azari & III. The Rüfüs bandmates have similar tastes, digging Booka Shade and Trentemøller and “some darker European influences” in tech-house. Yet they also rate the indie groups Foals and Kasabian (“That mish-mash of genres comes through in what we do”). It's this duality that will allow Rüfüs to join Big Day Out over summer as well as slot into Listen Out.

Rüfüs are currently in rehearsal mode. “We're rehearsing all the new tracks off the album. We obviously can't play all of them at Listen Out with what will be a 45-minute set, but we're trying to just fit in as many tracks as we can off the new album and also some oldies of ours that we're reworking a little bit to fit with the sound of everything as well. We're just trying to make it as exciting as possible for ourselves onstage.”

Rüfüs are building a profile overseas, their music reaching new ears via the internet and, specifically, blogs. And touring their music internationally is the second of Rüfüs' ambitions. “I guess what our ambition has been the whole time is to make the music that we wanna listen to, first and foremost – music that we can really be proud of.” In addition to playing shows in New York late last year (witnessed by members of the indie-dance cognoscenti from Vampire Weekend, LCD Soundsystem and Holy Ghost!), they just appeared at a festival in Moscow, of all places. “We plan to head back over to America for some dates I think early next year and Europe at some point next year as well.”