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Hometown: Toronto.

The lineup: Robert Alfons (vocals, synths).

The background: Trust were a duo until recently, comprising Robert Alfons, who is handsome enough to be a male model, and Maya Postepski, who is talented enough to be a former new band of the day. Apparently, Trust were "born out of desperation in the brutal Canadian winter of 2009" when the pair "began writing songs about nostalgia, lust, and erotomania". We're not sure whether Postepski left owing to issues arising from the lust and erotomania part or because she felt nostalgic herself and missed doing her thing as Austra. Either way, Trust is just Alfons now – he's the one in charge of the synth arpeggios, programmed throbs, and a voice that vacillates between a low post-Iggy tone with tinges of goth and something a little more wheedling and whiny, like Kenneth Williams moaning or Albert Steptoe leering. Within the context of what Trust do, it just about works.

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What Trust have done, principally, is put out an album called TRST that's very much in hock not only to synthpop but also (if you want to believe it's not entirely mired in early-80s electronica) to slow techno. Some have referenced Crystal Castles in reviews, others Fever Ray and Delphic. But really, the tracks on TRST sound mostly like lost classics from a nightclub playlist that might have featured 12-inch singles such as Memorabilia, Hard Times, I Just Can't Get Enough, Situation, Visage, Everything's Gone Green, Der Mussolini and Chant No 1.

This was a decade of dance, of decadence, when Euro hauteur became infused with earthly pop concerns and electronic music used the cold, Teutonic milieu to express the sort of feelings normally the preserve of rock or singer-songwriter acoustica: love and sex, deceit and longing, with an accent on sin, retribution and the dark side of desire. Alfons describes his music as "emotional dance" and admits to being a fan of "heartbreaking music like Nick Drake and Brian Eno, people who have written the most unbelievably gorgeous music I've ever heard". His lyrics are, he says, "more about sexual repression and gazing and being not so much 'in it'. I don't think they're intentionally sexual, or overtly sexual." He's obviously forgetting that titles on TRST include Gloryhole, Candy Walls and This Ready Flesh.

We've only been streaming it and don't have a finished copy, but we're hoping Trust's debut album opens with Sulk. That's a very 1982 synthpop song title right there, with the requisite sense of emotional abandon amid the early-Mode pulsebeats. It is scented with eau d'goth. Candy Walls, too, is heavy on atmospherics and metaphorical dry ice, positing Alfons, the lugubrious and lonely Canuck, as a digital Leonard Cohen. There's a track called Shoom, which you imagine could be about the emblematic haunt of late-80s smiley culture, but there are no slippery aciiid basslines here, just the pounding, insistent 4/4 rhythm of an earlier era. Some of these songs are so catchy, you can't believe no one thought of them before. And even the ones where Postepski's still onboard and sounding sexily bored will make you tap a toe, obviously encased in thigh-high, shiny, shiny boots of leather.

The buzz: "An album you should listen to. No ifs, no buts" – Vogue.

The truth: TRST never sleeps.

Most likely to: Go to Heaven.

Least likely to: Go to heaven.

What to buy: TRST is released by Arts and Crafts/PIAS on 22 October.

File next to: Depeche Mode, Crystal Castles, Austra, Cold Cave.

Links: www.electronicbeats.net/2012/07/23/true-faith-an-interview-with-trust.

Thursday's new band: MO.