Naked (On Drugs) break down into duo Sébastien Perrin and Luke Byron Scott, hailing from Lyon and Milton Keynes, respectively.

These two raconteurs thrive on a penchant for avant-garde and a hard-wired desire to dramatise their distorted aesthetic. Hypnotically compelling and rooted in post-punk noir, their flair for the unpredictable holds the trigger, stealing focus and beckoning you in. Harbouring a propensity for melodramatics they shun the confides of genre and stereotypes, uniting disparate influences to boundary-crushing effect.

Take their debut single Lee Ann Skin, for instance, juxtaposing a medley of instruments under a whirlwind barrage of sound. Unpredictable would be an understatement, its uncompromising noir thrill fed on a jarring diet of  sleazy distortion and spiky jazz.

Yet, don’t for one second consider that you have the band sussed after hearing one track, try Death Dance for size, a no-wave piano core interspersed by Perrin’s predatorily growls and squeals of interjecting clarinet, coming up for air amidst a jaunty drumbeat. Perrin croons with dissolute menace “her hand on my blue jeans, the smile on her face, she snaps her fingers, THEN I SNAP HER NECK!”

You can trace their aesthetic back to the likes of Psychic TV, Cabaret Voltaire and The Fall, and yet comparisons prove futile in describing a sound so idiosyncratic and varied. Their unpredictable, nature charms the listener, unknowing what to expect next, leaving you enthralled with a dissolutely moorish taste brewing in your mouth.

Alex James Taylor: What brought you and Luke together?
Sébastien Perrin: It was by mistake really. I was taking a vacation in Manchester, and went to see Jez Kerr playing live in a small bar, the guy from A Certain Ratio. It was absolutely dreadful. I really wanted to dance and so I started dancing towards the end when it got a bit bouncy. Luke approached me after the gig and told me that I danced weirdly. He’s a very shy guy and doesn’t usually approach people, we started talking then after that we just got really drunk.

AT: So what convinced you to make the move over to Manchester?
SP: After talking to Luke he suggested moving to Manchester and starting a band together. So I went back to France, sold pretty much everything I owned and within a few months I’d moved to Manchester.

AT: I have to ask you about the name, why Naked (On Drugs)?
SP: That name is a problem because it’s taken very literally by people, any monkey can be naked on drugs, its pretty easy. We just liked the image, the fact that you can imply so much simply through a name, I find rather ridiculous. Because of our name I think people tend to get very disappointed when they see us live because we’re wearing clothes and sober, mostly.

AT: Your sound is pretty experimental…
SP: It joins the name, most the songs are almost absurd in nature. Each song is like a little scene.

AT: I know what you mean, Death Dance feels like the soundtrack to a wacky, psychedelic Western.
SP: That is the kind of music we appreciate, stuff like the soundtrack to The Exorcist 2 which is composed by Ennio Morricone. He did the music for a lot of the Sergio Leone films like Once upon a time in America.

AT: Did you begin with this sound or has it evolved over time?
SP: It’s evolved quite a bit. To give you an idea of the sound we had originally, I think there’s still one of our old songs on Bandcamp called The Cat Song.

AT: Yeah, I listened to that earlier, its amazingly frantic…
SP: Thats the kind of stuff we did when we first started. I think we must have been really angry at this point. Luke was living in the place that Sways Records used to use for a recording studio. It’s a damp, dark place with no windows, he was living there with no money. I’d just moved over and hadn’t got a job yet, basically had no money at all. Generally speaking, it was a pretty miserable time, and I think the music reflected that. It was pretty much shapeless, screaming. Just really angry music, I think we’re a little less angry now.

AT: You mentioned Sways Records there, they seem to be gathering momentum within Manchester at the minute, how did your relationship with them begin?
SP: Well the band was pretty much born within Sways Records, on the night I met Luke I also met Ben Ward and Martin Hurley from Sways. I think originally Ben was meant to be in the band actually. We didn’t really talk about it but the agreement was always that Naked (On Drugs) was going to be a Sways Records band, even before we’d really started.

Thats partially one of the reasons I moved over to Manchester, the ethics behind Sways Records was something I could really relate to. The independence of it, the mood of it. They sometimes sign bands because the people are interesting, before they’d even heard the music. They sign people, personalities. There’s two selective processes – the people and the music.

AT: I’ve heard a lot about your live show, creating a feverish atmosphere seems to come natural to you. How important is the visual side to you?
SP: We treat the live show as a different medium, we don’t try to emulate our songs as they are recorded. Most of the time we use it as a way of rearranging our songs. We listen to a lot of free jazz and like the idea that something different is happening each night. Nothing is planned, we hardly practice – which isn’t always a good thing!

AT: I’ve read that you have been known to make your own instruments too, is this true?
SP: (Laughs) Yeah, that’s not strictly true. Here’s the story, we made an instrument when we had a lot of time on our hands, we created this horrendous two string thing which we christened the ‘Shitar’. You know how the bridge on a Sitar has a piece of bone usually which goes across the strings? Well we used metal instead, and it creates this crazy distorted screech. We never got round to using it because it sounds so fucking awful.

AT: So that won’t be going into production soon then…
SP: No, (laughing) I don’t think the Shitar is going to make it big in England any time soon.

AT: What are you currently working on?
SP: We are working on an album right now, writing a lot of songs for that. We write as much as we can so we get the freedom to edit.   Luke and I live in the same house, we write and record at the same time in the house.

Theres quite a few things we want to explore in the album, we like to dance so there’s some dance elements in there. There also seems to be some North African influence, for some reason which I can’t really fathom. Hopefully it’s all going to be recorded by October. We don’t have the financial means to put it out now, so I think sometime around March ’15 is an optimistic prediction.

Find Naked (On Drugs) on Facebook, Soundcloud and Bandcamp