I was on holiday when LP, the debut album by Discovery, a collaboration between Ra Ra Riot vocalist Wes Miles and Vampire Weekend keyboardist/producer Rostam Batmaglij, was released. By the time I got back, I expected half the world to be wearing their t-shirts.

I mean could any music released this year be more suited to summer? A collection of bottom-heavy, massive pop songs, built on synthlines, handclaps and 808s and with the sort of Auto-Tuned vocals you could only dream of, there won’t be another album released this year that’s such a wide-eyed synthesis of classic pop and the broken down boundaries of 21st century music. It’s 2009 in the aesthetics it adopts (Auto-Tune, Aeroplane, Usher, crunk), but there’s a longing on LP; a longing for a time when pop was genuinely massive, when a backing singer meant a choir and when a string section meant an orchestra. Every beat is big, every hook is massive, every melody is dripping with anxiety and every crescendo beaming with joy. So why has the world not gone mad for it?

I mean the hype’s there: everyone knew this release was coming. It sounds good in a jeep (I don’t have one, but with those half-time breakdowns it can’t not), at a BBQ or on your headphones on a train or a flight. God knows, but it’s the best thing I’ve heard this year. With that in mind, there were heaps of questions I wanted to ask Wes and Rostam when I had the opportunity to get them on a conference call (one of us based in LA, one in New York and the other – me – in the UK). How they felt about making a record inevitably redlighted on the hipster radar that so unashamedly used the Auto-Tune they’ve had rammed down their throat for the last year. Who they felt their peers were. What was still to come. Whether they felt in opposition to an indie market where lo-fi acts like Times New Viking and No Age have become en vogue again. Whether they thought modern pop has enough balls or not. Whether they liked the Postal Service or not – loads of questions.

Half this stuff didn’t get asked; the interview was at 1am on a Friday night conference call with some serious delay between the three parties. And half of what was asked my Dictaphone decided to wipe (though the answer to ‘what was still to come’ is ‘no live shows, but a second album once they’ve figured out what concept they’re going to go with’. Oh, and they’ve also both been in Dirty Projectors at one point). But here’s some insight into the workings of the most vibrant pop duo that Pitchfork will score a 6.8 this year.

Hey. So tell us about the genesis of the Discovery project.

Wes: “Well we got together just wanting to make music; not necessarily with the limitations that we imposed on ourselves for this record – those came later. Once we had them, we knew that vocal harmonies were important and that we wanted to limit ourselves to fuzzy synths and hand claps, and 808s – and it just kind of went from there…”

This was like 4 years ago right?

Rotham: “Was it?”

W: “Yeah, this was like summer of 2005. Summer of 2005 was when we kind of started, just working together, recording together, and 2006 is when the concept coalesced, and we decided we wanted to make a whole album.”

Was this before Vampire Weekend had even formed?

R: “Well we started making music before we had the bands that we’re in currently. A lot of the beats and some of the ideas definitely came before Vampire Weekend.”

How’s Discovery’s sound developed over this time?

R: “Hm, I guess the first half of the album is older than the second half, generally speaking. Maybe ‘Osaka Loop Line’ was like the beginning, then ‘Can You Discovery’, then ‘Orange Shirt’, then I guess a lot of other stuff kind of developed at the same time.”

Did you make a lot of material and whittle it down to those 10 tracks, or did you slowly build to them?

R: “Yeah, we just kind of accumulated songs over the sessions. [laughs] A couple of things didn’t make the LP, but we didn’t pursue them ’til the end. I think we could see they weren’t working out. There was an idea to have an album where every song was from a different era. And then I guess it did kind of develop into the confines that went on the music later [vocals, synths, handclaps etc]”

You talk about eras…you could argue Discovery’s a hark back to pop’s past, but in the way it combines, for example, Auto-Tune with indie, you could also argue it’s incredibly 21st century music. Where do you place your sound?

R: “I think it’s pretty relevant… [laughs] A lot of the really low-end stuff that’s happening you couldn’t do in the old days; I mean speakers couldn’t handle really low lows until more recently, like not ’til subwoofers got big. I mean I don’t know what it was like for you, but when I got to college everybody had a subwoofer, and I think that was really inspiring to me, ’cause subwoofers had this really rubbery sound. That’s very new in terms of like, the great history of pop recordings or whatever, like if you listen to something from the 80s it doesn’t have those subwoofers.”

Were you self-conscious about putting out material that’s so Auto-Tune focused, with how big that sound got while you were making LP – climatizing with the Kanye album and T-Pain’s stuff?

R: “I don’t think so. I’m not concerned, because I think Auto-Tune is here to stay, you know, it’s been around; its been used in music all around the world, in Arabic music, in Indian music… It’s an effect we wanted to go for, and I think we did it differently to how T-Pain does it, or how Kanye does it. I think it’s a very hot topic right now, but when that novelty wears off people will see we’re using it for more than just covering shit up. Songwriting is what makes these songs work; Auto-Tune is just a texture, like distortion is a texture for some bands.”