Electronica: don't you just love it. The source of as many exciting pop thrills as noodly, "progressive" nonsense, not to mention underscoring the whole dance scene, the blanket term "electronica" has brought us, over the years, anything and everything including the sublime Kraftwerk and the patently ridiculous Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

The newest kids on the synth block are Add N To (X), the London trio of Ann Shenton, Barry Smith and Steve Claydon, and mercifully they are trying to combine the "avant-garde" with three-minute pop songs (no matter how oblique). They take their name from a supposed computer command that creates an unknown third electronic force and describe themselves, quite magnificently, as "shock-wave riders who worship the force that plugs them in."

You may have heard the single, Metal Fingers In My Body, or even seen the vaguely erotic/pornographic video - depending on how you see these things - for the song. Either way, prepare yourselves for "a collage of random, violent and sporadic sounds in collision with melody to collapse the boundaries of rock and roll" as, again, they say themselves. The band were formed, they say, when Barry found a discarded MS20 synthesiser in a bin in Picadilly Circus. Shortly afterwards he ran into Ann, who was DJing at an abstract electronica club (aren't they all, missus) called We Are Electric.

To formulate their sound, they used the rather simple expedient of switching on all the keyboards at their disposal in a studio and playing them at random until they came up with a sound they liked. One of their earliest gigs was at a Paris catwalk show, and they released their first album, On The Wires Of Our Nerves, last year. Now signed to Mute Records, the new album Avant Hard is one of those affairs that comes out of nowhere, with not much of a promotional budget, to knock everything else into touch.

If you getting vibes of Einsturzende Neubaten off this band, you'd be more right than wrong - just listen to Barry talking about the nature of sound: "Music is an invisible force. It's not a quantifiable object and it doesn't exist, but at the same time it exists everywhere. We hear harmony in building sites. We feel that everything from Baroque quartets up to Concorde is the sound of music." They certainly know their electronica, dropping names like Bruce Hack and Leon Theremin (the man who invented the instrument of the same name).

Barry says their music is "an historical and linear progression" in the field of electronic music - "by abbreviating something you're taking it to its simplest form and the easiest way to achieve that is to go back to the original machines. We did that not out of a fetishistic reason but out of poverty. If you go to a car boot sale you'll always find an old synthesiser, but you won't necessarily find a Gibson guitar. There's so much out there to discover, especially things that are vilified or seen as obsolete. And we always find that because of their obsolete nature, these things are intrinsically valuable." They mention a condition known as "synaesthesia", a sort of cross-wiring of the senses wherein sufferers can "hear colours" - famous synaesthetes include the Russian artist Kandinsky, who is credited with painting the first real abstract piece of art. "The way we make a lot of the tracks on the album is based on lexical synaesthesia," says Barry, "which means that you see imagery as sound and colours."

Added on to this is all the sci-fi stuff: "There's this perfect science fiction film always going through our heads when it comes to the album," he continues. "But we're not being retro or trying to recreate the feel of our own science fiction films - like a 1970s idea of the future. We're trying to physically embrace the future rather than replicate the past. We're aggressive futurists. It's just what happens when you turn the machine on."

You get the feeling that they wouldn't really like it that much if you described them as the "new Kraftwerk" but certainly in terms of innovation, and the application of technology, Add N To (X) are up there with the early pioneers of Krautrock. And for the moment at least, they're pushing all the right buttons.

Avant Hard by Add N To (X) is on the Mute label.