In the world of electronic music, where the majority of artists reach out to audiences as DJs or from behind a laptop, a compelling live show gives a new act an edge. Australian band The Presets — vocalist/keyboardist Julian Hamilton and drummer/programmer/keyboardist Kim Moyes — have certainly found themselves in front of ever-larger crowds thanks as much to the duo’s exuberance as to their musical chops.

“What we do is actually not that hard, we just get out there and jump around a lot,” says Hamilton from a tour stop in San Francisco. “We play our keyboards and live drums and, of course, have a computer helping us, but basically we just try to have the best time we can. We’ve found that the more fun we’re having onstage — the crazier and looser we are — the looser the audience is.”

The two “classically trained musos” — they met at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music and initially collaborated on an experimental, instrumental project called Prop — took their love of dance music and spectacle on the road after releasing their edgy, hook-laden debut album, Beams, on Modular in 2005. The Presets now display two years of almost non-stop touring throughout their sophomore release, Apocalypso.

“Beams we created in a studio and then we took it on the road,” ventures Hamilton. “When you’re performing the same songs every night, you really get a clear idea of what you love doing live and you do kind of make mental notes, like, ‘This is fun. Must write more songs like this.’ So, for the writing of Apocalypso, we had a benchmark we could relate it back to.

“Also, when we first started doing this, it was pretty weird music in terms of what was coming out of Australia, and we were never really that sure how people would react to it. As the shows got bigger and more fun, we were encouraged to go home and really make the music we wanted to because we knew that people would get into it if we were honest with ourselves.”

This honesty not only translated into writing sharper, crisper electronic pop songs with increased tempos, it also meant more depth and range in subject matter.

“Lyrically, the main themes of Beams are all about partying, good times, sex and that kind of thing,” Hamilton says. “The lyrics on Apocalypso include some more political themes, and more [lyrics] about sexual personality — it didn’t all have to be about dancing and screwing.

“In the time that we were writing these songs, politically in Australia we had a pretty horrible government [Australia’s long-serving, notoriously anti-Aboriginal Prime Minister John Howard was ousted late in 2007]. Watching the news, it did sort of feel at times like ‘Is this the end of the world?’ You just felt so isolated from what was really going on yet you could still go out dancing, you could still make love, so there was heart and fun to be had in this really stark, horrible place. That’s what Apocalypso means — it’s like a big party at the end of time.”

To that end, Apocalypso is an album of pronounced contrasts. Songs like the blistering “My People” sit alongside romantic synth-pop numbers including “This Boy’s in Love.”

With guitar riffs and punchy beats giving the songs grit while keyboards tug at your heart and the lyrics offer sexual ambiguity, Apocalypso situates The Presets as sons of ’80s acts like Bronski Beat, ABC and Depeche Mode as much as it does their modern-day peers including fellow Australians Cut Copy and Midnight Juggernauts.

 “Yeah, definitely, and also Pet Shop Boys and Eurythmics,” says an excited Hamilton as I draw the parallels. “They all sort of pillaged the dance and club scene for their sound and style, but first and foremost, they wrote beautiful pop songs.

 “That’s what we really wanted to do this time around. A lot of the beats and the production are quite cold and stark and hopefully quite bare, almost unemotive, but then we wanted to take that palette and inject these warm, hopeful, romantic pop and love songs into them — exactly like Bronski Beat. That stuff is gold. I almost get chills just mentioning that band’s name, they made such beautiful music. They’re our gods.”