Vivian Girls may be the latest buzz band to slouch out of Brooklyn but it appears they have yet to reap the financial benefits.

“We’ll have to keep the conversation short, it costs us a dollar a minute,” drummer Ali Koehler says tersely, by way of introduction.

The all-girl trio are not ones for dawdling around anyway. Their eponymous debut, re-released on Californian garage-rock imprint In The Red in September, after the first 500-copy run sold out, comes in at 22 minutes. One of the tracks is just under 90 seconds long.

Heavily influenced by American punk rockers The Wipers and 1960s girl groups, Ali, a recent replacement for original drummer Frankie Rose, admits one of their main intentions is “just to play fast”.

“We wanted to be like The Wipers but with girl group harmonies,” she says. “We love the drum beats of girl groups and we have similar lyrical content.”

No surprise then that Vivian Girls have earned comparisons to bands such as Tallulah Gosh and the Shop Assistants, who also melded fuzzy squall and sweet harmonies during the mid-1980s.

“That wasn’t intentional,” says Ali. “None of us were even aware of that stuff. But you see where (the critics) are coming from some of the time. If they think we sound like that, then maybe we do. We think we’re just doing our own thing.”

The girls (in addition to the genuinely-monikered Ali, there is Cassie Ramone and Kickball Katy) have also been compared to The Jesus And Mary Chain, thanks to their wall-of-sound leanings.

A love of feedback in their live shows confused some gig-goers in America (where they have supported Toronto hardcore outfit F***ed Up), who assumed their sound engineer wasn’t doing his job. “But they seem to get it here (in the UK),” says Ali.

Some of their tinny, raw sound is a product of circumstance as much as anything intentional.

“For the most part, the album sounded almost exactly how we wanted it to sound,” says Cassie. “But we weren’t able to spend as much time mixing or recording it, because we had very little money to make it.”

They’ve just released EP Surf’s Up on their own label Wild World. It is a fan-girl “fun pack” of ocean-themed tracks, that includes a cover of the Beach Boys’ Girl Don’t Tell Me, plus a T-shirt and some badges.

They are also working on the next album – “It will be a little darker and we’re going to experiment more with different drum beats and that sort of thing,” says Cassie.

They’ve even managed to fit in a little controversy, after fans took offence to their supposedly ironic comments about “ordinary people” in an online video interview.

“It was totally taken the wrong way and out of context,” says Cassie. “The people asked us questions we weren’t aware of beforehand and we had to come up with answers – they were just meant to stir up controversy and boost website hits.

“We certainly don’t have that mentality. ‘Ordinary people’? We are ordinary people.”

Vivian Girls will be joined by Brighton four-piece The Lyrebirds.

  • 10.15pm, £7/£6, 01273 603974