• AUDIO: Hear Sneaky Sound System play Kansas City

IT TAKES most bands a while to follow up a successful debut. Having had a lifetime's worth of songs from which to pick for their first album, the pressure is on to surpass it both in terms of quality and sales, and the sooner the better.

With second album 2 - which arrived last weekend, not even a year after their double-award-winning triumph at the ARIAs - Sneaky Sound System appear to have tackled the "quality" aspect without breaking a sweat. It's the most accessible, enjoyable, unashamed pop album you'll hear all year.

"I think we took a lot of people by surprise when we said we actually had a new record," says Angus McDonald aka Black Angus, Sneaky's multi-instrumentalist musical mastermind, huddling around an outdoor Darlinghurst table with singer "Miss" Connie Mitchell and frontman Daimon "MC Double D" Downey. "People were starting to say, 'When are you gonna start doing it?' We were like, 'Well, we've actually finished it.'"
Of course, the Sydney trio didn't just knock 2 out in a few months - work on it really started before success even kicked in for the group. It's easy to forget that their debut album, simply titled Sneaky Sound System, had spectacular legs: it took a steady year of excited word of mouth for it to go platinum (70,000 copies sold) and only around that time did the mainstream properly catch on. The consequent increased demand meant the debut eventually spawned a total of six singles, including bona fide hits I Love It, Pictures and UFO; add a couple of ARIA awards and sales soared past the double-platinum mark.
After typically exuberant gigs at festivals such as Glastonbury in June, alongside the British release of Pictures, Sneaky Sound System are now making an impact in Europe, too.

The new album has been wittily described by one of the band's inner circle as having "more singles than [dating website] rsvp.com". Their strike rate is indeed formidable: you can picture yourself turning up the volume to all 10 of the tracks on 2, were you to hear them on the radio.

"We wanted every song to count," McDonald says. "And if it didn't count, it didn't get through. It's been very difficult choosing the singles, to be honest."
"But you know what?" Downey chips in. "That's a great problem. It's not like people going, 'OK, that's the one I like,' and pushing all the other ones to the side."
What 2 does particularly well is achieve a dream second-album balance: it retains much of what drew you to the debut - for Sneaky, that includes the songs' enormous, danceable hooks and Mitchell's powerhouse vocals - while at the same time the band have broadened and polished their overall sound.

There have been casualties, though. Downey rapped and McDonald sang on much of Sneaky Sound System; on 2 there are no male vocals apart from a handful of vocoder-treated refrains. That could have justifiably bruised an ego or two.

"Oh, listen, we play to our strengths," Downey says coolly. "Connie's an amazing singer and the album wasn't conducive to any rapping as such . . . That's how it is."

McDonald: "The songs always tell you what to do. I think they just sort of went in that direction - just suited more this electronic, melodic sorta vibe. When we do it live, things evolve."

Mitchell's biggest problem was being, as she puts it, "naughty" when it came to thinking about her vocal performance on the album.

"What she means by naughty is last-minute," McDonald says. "She's out the front, sketching down things . . . doing her homework at the last second. But that kind of really works sometimes; it's very fresh and you don't question it. Other times it's a bit more thought-out."

"One is sort of, 'Oh shivers, I'm in trouble, I'd better get this done,'   " says Mitchell, on this day looking every inch the superstar diva. "Squeezed under pressure, some people deliver - a bit Gordon Ramsay, you know what I mean? The other ones, where I had too much time to think about it, I would really rely on Angus to go, 'Listen, leave it now, that's really good.'"

There's always room for humour on a Sneaky Sound System album, too. In the middle of the track When We Were Young, for example, Mitchell mimics a mother berating her child with, "I told you to eat your dinner!" As I Just Don't Want To Be Loved reaches a melancholy climax, Downey's robotic voice starts repeating, "This is the best part / The very, very best part."

"I dunno, that [latter lyric] just seemed like the natural thing to say at that point, didn't it?" McDonald says, a little sheepishly. "Oh, we're funny guys, hey?"

Downey: "Australia is, without question, the least pretentious place on earth. But I like [humour] in music - like the Presets, they're the funniest guys ever and it comes through in their music. Like, they take the piss totally; camp it up. They're not
gay but every [other] song's about loving boys . . . it's so funny."

Two weeks later, they're launching 2 at an industry showcase at Paddington Town Hall. They perform eight tracks from the album - songs so new, few can say they know them really well - no old tunes and still people are raving about it afterwards. Typically, Mitchell is in superb voice and Downey is in irresistible form. The whole band, augmented live by long-time bassist Jono Sloan and new drummer Shaun Sibbes, clearly enjoy it as much as those watching. With the new material out there, it's surely an exciting time?

"I'm pretty pumped," McDonald says, the morning after the triumphant night before. "It's an interesting time [compared] to last time. The first time around you had to warm people up, kinda like slowly, slowly. This time around it's kinda
like the iron is boiling hot."