MADRID MIGHT BE THE CULTURAL capital of Spain, but the feisty, iconoclastic city of Barcelona has long been home to a bubbling stew of inventive new music. One of the scene’s biggest exports is a group whose catchy, dancefloorready electronic sound is not at all what one would expect from Spain—especially considering that its songs are often sung in English and laced with a sweet, infectious silliness.

The “group” is actually two friends—Mister Furia (Salvador Rey) and Professor Manso (Alex Llovet)—and they call themselves The Pinker Tones. On the strength of their second album, 2006’s The Million Colour Revolution, the duo toured for two years and built a strong following. It didn’t take long for their upbeat, devil-may-care delivery to catch fire in the U.S. and other countries around the world, thus setting the stage for their latest, Wild Animals.

“There was this wild energy loading up during those two years of touring,” Furia says, explaining the rationale behind the album title. “Once we got into the studio for a few days, it was like a huge discharge of energy. We always have a tendency to go in different directions once we have done something, so the aim is always to reinvent ourselves as artists. It’s fun as well. This time I think we’ve created a more direct album. The last album was like utopia—the way we’d like things to be—but this is more of a description of the world we live in.”

Furia and Manso first met in college, but went their separate ways until years later, when they kept running into each other during a three-day stretch in Barcelona. Furia was working on the music for a television series and asked Manso to collaborate. They synergy was immediate and exciting.

“The first thing we noticed was that it was relatively easy to work together,” Furia recalls, stressing the fact that although the two work well as a team, they are contrasting personalities. “I’m the analog guy, and Manso is more the digital high-tech person. He’s really rhythmic, and I’m really harmonic. He’s the computer drum, and I’m a tube amp. It’s a bit of a yin-yang story, but we could spend a lot of hours together without fighting too much.”

Despite a troubled music industry in Spain that is being wracked by piracy, Furia sees a strong, creative scene in Barcelona. Noting that the port city has always “been on the periphery” because of the attention paid to Madrid, he says Barcelona’s mix of cultures has created a thriving music incubator, with such artists as Ojos De Brujo, Muchachito Bombo Infierno, Macaco and Amparanoia being the most visible examples. As if to accentuate the point, “Happy Everywhere” the first video from Wild Animals. Dressed in matching black outfits, the duo sings in a lazy, feel-good groove about the merits of both the city and the country, all done with their typical sly, loopy humor.

Asked why so many of their songs are in English, Furia insists that “the songs select their own language,” and points out that the group also sings in French, for example. Both he and Manso grew up listening to American music and were influenced by their extensive touring in the U.S. last year—and they’re surprisingly slotted to play the entire Warped tour this summer—but they’ve never set out specifically to target an English-speaking market. “[It’s a sign of] the good and bad things of globalization. We probably have more in common with a kid growing up in Tokyo or Washington D.C. than someone growing up in a small village outside of Barcelona. I won’t judge whether it’s good or not, but it’s a reality.”

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