The two members of Electric Lady Lab are childhood friends, each with a bittersweet history of musical success behind them. Now working as a team, they’ve hit it big with the single “You & Me”, and have just released their blue-toned electropop debut album, ”FLASH!”. Apart from wanting to help put Denmark on the international music map, they hope to point out some false prejudices about pop music.

The path to success for singer Stine Hjelm Jacobsen and composer, producer and lyricist Martin Bøge Pedersen has been as long and winding as “FLASH!” and its 11 tracks are right on target. Although they’d known each other since they were teenagers, the two artists first took separate routes that seemed to lead to success, but then turned out to mean too many disappointing compromises. Stine was in the power pop group NU, which was billed as the hottest thing going in Britain in the summer of 2003, and Martin was in The Loft, which pretty much left everyone else in the dust with the 2004 single “City of Dreams”. She was set to be an indie star, while he planned to become a hit factory. But things didn’t turn out that way, and when Martin started toying with new, more dance-oriented ideas, there was only one singer that would do – Stine, from his hometown of Køge.

“We’ve often said this was meant to be. Everything we’d done before was just to prepare for this,” Stine says. Martin continues, “We’d both been involved in projects that forced us to make so many compromises. Now we have a clear vision that we both share – and that makes it easier to do things our way.”

In Electric Lady Lab, Martin wields the killer bass lines and hooks. He already showed his talent for writing crystal clear songs when he was with The Loft, and he’s brought that with him to Electric Lady Lab. The single “You & Me” has been downloaded 26,000 times in Denmark, released in Europe, and watched some 830,000 times on YouTube. His talent rests on his ability to turn chaos into a cosmos, shape it, pare it down and cut right to the bone, based on principles like “if we need background vocals to make the chorus stand out, the chorus isn’t good enough”. And he does it with radio airplay in mind. Combined with his interest in sampling bits of other artists’ songs – Snap!’s “Rhythm Is a Dancer” is sampled on “You & Me” – this often takes him into areas where the taste police love to patrol.

“It’s not about me fitting in. I wouldn’t sample something if it would ruin the tune. And sampling is something that runs deep for me. As a teen, I collected hip hop records, and I got my first sampler very early on. In fact, the songs that take the longest to record – and are least fun to make – are songs where I use samples, because it’s really important that the new song does something different from the original. Like Bono says, ‘Every poet is a thief’,” Martin concludes.

Stine continues, “Being good at making pop hits is becoming more acceptable among musicians. But being “commercial” is still taboo. If we could do something about that, I’d be really proud of it.

And Electric Lady Lab isn’t more pop than it is. It’s also about the resilience and intensity of the club scene. It’s hip hop’s enthusiasm for playing with sounds. It’s Depeche Mode’s ability to paint thick nocturnal skies. And it’s a striving to live up to music history’s back catalogue of fiery Number Ones. The lyrics seethe with urban melancholy and tainted love. Martin writes them but with Stine in mind, since “women are just more interesting than men”.

“You think like a woman,” Stine says, and continues introspectively: “There’s a lot of melancholy in me. It might be the Faroese in me, but I just can’t get up there and sing ‘happy, happy, happy’.”

You can hear the way in to this universe right in the opening track, “Last Virgin Alive”, which has become something of a hymn for the duo, and introduces the package they think will be their ticket to international success.

“We’ve wanted the project to be international right from the start. We want to be the ones who compete with German artists on their own turf and with British ones on theirs. We want to show that Denmark has producers and songwriters who are just as good as theirs,” says Martin, who shares with Stine a refusal to let bumps in the road deter him from pop music success.

“I’ve never doubted for a minute that I’d continue with music. Partly because I still haven’t achieved what want to. Not yet,” Stine concludes.