"Avant-Garde is no good without popular and popular is rubbish without a bit of avant-garde."

This was always the motto of Broadcast, one of the first bands to unite esoteric electronica label Warp with a less bleep-happy audience.

But on new album Tender Buttons, Birmingham's finest have made themselves truly at home in the halfway house between pop melody and enigmatic twiddling.

Formed some time in the mid-Nineties and fronted by the haughtily sensual vocals of Trish Keenan, Broadcast set about marrying influences of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and library music to the grand motions of torch ballads and waltz-time.

As a five-piece, they made strange space pop. As a trio, they offset a more ambient strain with massive drum beats.

Now they're stripped down to a duo (Keenan and bassist James Cargill) and making their most abrasively electronic and melodically tender music to date.

Released earlier this month, third album proper Tender Buttons follows the "less is more" principle. Where previously they were buffeted by overlapping waves of fuzzy electronica, here Keenan's enchantingly disenchanted vocals flit through gently flowering feedback or float on a light smattering of electronic drum beats.

Meanwhile the lyrics, generated through automatic writing according to the principle that "if you throw words together randomly, they naturally make sense", range from the robotically seductive ("Do that, do that to my anatomy" Keenan intones over the subdued noise surf of Corporeal) to the downright disconcerting - single America's Boy was apparently inspired by a tabloid cryptic crossword.

"When I was making this album I lost my dad," Keenan explains. "I was looking after him when he was dying and at the same time I was writing a lot of the songs, I wasn't trying to describe my feelings, I was trying to let go.

"Musicians get too involved in meaning something, over-concerned with integrity. I was too tired to be reflective."

They may sound a tad ponderous, even pretentious, on paper. But catch the newly-honed Broadcast live and you can expect to be caught up in a hypnotic swirl of psychedelic avant-pop.