There's something steady but explosive about London's The Big Pink. The band has compressed 50 years of loveless and lovelorn rock and roll into a sometimes unsettled but frequently tender circle. They're a truly modern pop group - seamlessly, the band melds folkish and warm melodies, the spiritual tranquility of soul and gospel, the rhythmic propulsion of rave, the white noise of punk, the glitchy textures of electronica, and the heavy drones of your favorite New York rock bands for a sound that's both distant and utterly familiar.

But above and beyond it all, they sing about love: "Love for everything," they proclaim. They call what they do "Armageddon love songs", a neat way of describing their sinister-sweet ruminations on the subject. "If there's an underbelly of depression," they say, "we sugar-coat it."

Not that they're nihilists; they're having too good a time to be negative. "We're a positive band. We love each other, and we love life. It's all very exciting. We're having the best time. There's nothing bad in our lives and we've got nothing to complain about."

Some of the tracks on A Brief History Of Love include "A Brief History Of Love," "Too Young To Love" and "Love In Vain." There's a lot of love in what The Big Pink do. Milo Cordell, one half of the duo, considers Lost And Lookin' by Sam Cooke to be the best love song ever while his other half, Robbie Furze, believes that every song they do has "got to be as good as (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay by Otis Redding." He adds: "You can argue about music and styles, but if we can write our My Girl then nothing else matters."

They virtually have already: on "Introduction To Awareness," the B-side of their brilliant second single "Velvet," amid the swathes of synth and wraith-like vocals, is the faltering bassline to the classic tune Smokey Robinson wrote for The Temptations.

Furze and Cordell were destined to make bittersweet, soulfully intense drone- disco together. They met at a drum'n'bass rave in the middle of nowhere on millennium eve, but they've only been recording as Big Pink since 2007.

They're quite different but a perfect match. Milo's father, Denny Cordell, was a record producer who worked on such legendary late-‘60s singles as Procul Harum's A Whiter Shade Of Pale and Joe Cocker's With A Little Help From My Friends. Robbie's family were "not particularly musical", although his parents' love of The Band did lead them to name him Robbie after Robbie Robertson. He moved around a lot - including one place that happened to be next door to a squat inhabited by none other than goth-metal overlords Killing Joke, whose notorious frontman Jaz Coleman took a shine to Robbie's mum, much to his dad's chagrin.

Not surprisingly, after being pummelled into submission by the Joke's apocalyptic clatter coming through the walls, Robbie first got into metal - Metallica, Pantera, Slayer, Napalm Death - and then the proto-industrial noise of Einsturzende Neubaten and their successors such as Ministry, Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, followed by the propulsive Eurobeat of Front 242.

He toured with Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot and boss of Digital Hardcore Recordings and became a DHR artist in his own right: Panic DHH, who released an album described by Kerrang as "a fully-fledged vision of electronically treated music devastating in scope and utterly visceral in execution."

Back in England, Milo was experiencing his own version of nirvana: hearing Klaxons for the first time, at Madame JoJo's in December 2005. "That was the first time a UK band played music I wanted to hear," he says. The first wave of Noughties punk-funkers were not, he says, "aggressive or punky enough; they cared if they went out of time or broke a string." Klaxons, on the other hand, "didn't give a fuck."

Milo liked the band so much he went out and started a label. Since then, Merok have put out early releases by Klaxons, Crystal Castles, Teenagers, Telepathe and Titus Andronicus. He also joined forces with Robbie for a second label called Hatechannel. Their intention? "To be offensive and aggressive, and harder than Digital Hardcore."

It was inevitable, after several years behind the scenes and dabbling with marginal, experimental noise, that the pair would decide to do something with broader appeal. And so, in December '07, Big Pink were born.

"We had a conversation that went, ‘Let's start a noise band'," says Milo. Early sessions involved a ProTools set-up, a bunch of Marshall amps at two ends of a rehearsal space, two guitars, some synths, a bunch of FX pedals and a lot of "fucking around."

"We built up walls and walls of sound," they explain, "which we looped up and put a beat behind, then we added the vocal melodies and the words. Eventually, they became Big Pink songs."

So why Big Pink?

"Because," says Robbie, "my parents were obsessed with The Band and my dad had The Last Waltz documentary, which I found amazing - those guys, that's a real rock'n'roll band. They spent 15 years on the road." Initially, Milo had other plans, name-wise. "I wanted to be called Big Black but we were beaten to it. Then I got into homoerotic/gay symbolism: our first MySpace page was full of young boys with erections and guys sucking cock... So we went for Big Pink, because ‘big' suggests delusions of grandeur and ‘pink' is gay and phallic."

The idea for the band as a whole was quite simple at first: they wanted to be "the digital Velvet Underground", combining melody and noise in a way that was "more Phil Spector than My Bloody Valentine." Now their aim is even simpler.

"We've made the progression from noise and aggression towards melody and song structure, and now we consider ourselves a soul band," says Robbie. "That's soul as in Otis Redding, Joe Tex, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Solomon Burke, the Stax label..."

Still, he and Milo recognize the dissonance in what they do; the enormous wall of rhythm and sound that they erect around their melodies.

"Okay," says Milo, "if Otis Redding and John Cale hung out together and fucked, their child would be Robbie." Acknowledging the biological impossibility of such a coupling, he changes his mind. "Or if Aretha Franklin and Al Jourgenson had a kid..."

Big Pink aren't necessarily a "druggy band"; rather their music and lyrics reflect on the drug experience and revel in the afterglow. The effect of what they do is narcotic: it will knock you out, stupefy you, make you feel blissed-out. "That's a love in itself," they say, "the love of that experience..."

-Paul Lester