Young and Sexy might not be young and sexy in the traditional Miley-Cyrus-photo-shoot sense, but then, The Zombies weren’t actual zombies either. Still, it’s easy to see why some might take the quintet’s tongue-in-cheek handle seriously. Like their 1960s baroque-pop predecessors, Young and Sexy cultivate a sombre, sincere sound on their fourth album, The Arc, a masterful blend of minor-key melodies and haunting harmonies. On the phone from Vancouver, singer Paul Pittman chats about the band’s famous fans, their name and their headline-baiting intra-group lovin’.

Why should people see you at North By Northeast?
I’m not good at selling myself. We’re playing really well these days.

I hear that R.E.M. were at your record release party.
That’s the reason people should come to our show: because famous people are there. We played and found out after that they were there. [Guitarist] Andre [Lagace] talked to Mike Mills and our drummer tried to pawn some CDs off on them, but I never ended up talking to them. I was feeling pretty self-conscious after the show.

Is that normal for you?
Yeah, I don’t think I’m that comfortable onstage. After shows, I just want to hide away. I feel like, you have to get me out of here for at least 45 minutes, so I can decompress. The idea of trying to make small talk with R.E.M. seemed like a monumental task at the time.

Let’s go back to the band’s formation: you and [co-vocalist] Lucy Brain had been in a romantic relationship. How did you transition from exes to bandmates?
The breakup was pretty quick, but there were lingering feelings for a year or so. Then I wrote her a song to try to win her back and I got her to sing it on a four-track because she was always singing in the shower and I thought she had a nice voice. I didn’t tell her I wrote it for her. We did a couple of shows and after that I formed another band without her, which lasted for about a year. At that point, a friend of ours asked us to do a show, like a real show, so we needed a name.

I saw a review of The Arc on someone’s blog that started out saying, “First off, I hate the [band] name. It’s so conceited!”
Yeah, that’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard: that we were being vain. What people don’t understand is that when we came up with the name it was ironic because we were really ugly back then.

After you and Lucy broke up, she married and then split with Andre. How inevitable is intra-band intimacy? Is it possible for group members to simply be colleagues like in other lines of work?
There’s one Vancouver supergroup — I won’t name names — who seem to be a little like that: you punch in your card, do your job and get paid the big bucks. They’re great though. For us, it’s great because these are the people I want to hang out with anyway — although when we made the third record [2006’s Panic When You Find It], Lucy and Andre were in the process of breaking up and that was hell because one of them would be crying and one of them would get pissed off and leave. But when we’re all getting along, we just really enjoy playing music together.