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About the Artist\n\nWith Noisettes, it\'s always best to expect the unexpected. Two years on from a debut album awash with punk spirit and scorching blues-rock, the London trio return with Wild Young Hearts, a set of sleek pop songs steeped in soul, dizzy on disco and harking back to the days of blues and jazz greats.\nFrom the stomping electro-rock of Saturday Night and galloping funk grooves of forthcoming, first single Don\'t Upset The Rhythm, to the joyous, jazzy title track, the glorious `60s-tinged soul of Never Forget You and the sultry, shimmering pop of 24 Hours, in Wild Young Hearts, Noisettes have made what is set to be one of 2009\'s most adventurous albums.\nNever fond of a formula, the trio always intended on a radical musical detour from their acclaimed debut, What\'s The Time Mr Wolf?, an album that spawned five singles and took them on tour for over a year, sharing arena stages with Muse and criss-crossing the States with TV On The Radio and Bloc Party.\n\"Some bands stick with the same style forever,\" says singer Shingai Shoniwa, whose versatile vocals have seen her compared to everyone from Deborah Harry and Kate Bush to Billie Holiday and Diana Ross. \"They get together because they share identical musical tastes, then never do anything different. We\'re a gang, but we\'re also three divas with different record collections who constantly introduce each other to new sounds, whether it\'s African music, jazz, Van Morrison or Black Sabbath. For us, making music means keeping our ears open.\"\nNoisettes certainly took an unconventional approach to starting songwriting. Fresh from tour in summer 2007, guitarist Dan Smith (a man known to pair silver trousers with a yellow, sequinned shirt) and bearded drummer Jamie Morrison (who still seems surprised to be in a band at all) began sonic experiments that involved getting stoned before trips to the Natural History Museum, then attempting to cover the likes of Britney\'s Hit Me Baby (One More Time).\n\"We wrote over the top of lots of brilliant, outright pop songs, then removed the backing track to see what was left,\" explains Morrison. \"None of what we ended up with appears on the album, but the process inspired us to come up with new ways of songwriting. We also hung out in a lot of clubs, then came home and tried to copy the sounds we liked. That freed us from the conventions of writing guitar-based tunes.\"\nCome autumn, the trio piled their equipment in to a van and spent random weeks writing at residential studios in the likes of Devon and Brighton. En route, they listened to early Prince and Portishead, Queen, Talk Talk and Fleetwood Mac. The theme of the songs was captured in the album\'s title.\n\"Wild Young Hearts - it\'s about feeling young and acting young, whatever your age,\" says Smith. \"It\'s about having fun and not following the pack. The three of us became genuine friends making this record. We got drunk together and even trashed the odd hotel room. We\'re very different people, but we formed a bond which you can hear in the songs.\"\nThe new material was road tested at sporadic shows last year, including a performance at South By South West and a tour of France, where Don\'t Upset The Rhythm brought the house down every night, convincing Noisettes they were on to something special. Yet the band still weren\'t sure how the album would sound until they holed up in a London studio last June with Arctic Monkey\'s producer Jim Abbiss.\n\"We knew we wanted soul and an atmosphere that captured a specific period of time, the way Portishead albums do,\" says Morrison. \"But we had never played the songs together in a studio. All the parts were demoed separately on computer, with no real instruments. The idea was to feel like we were covering songs we vaguely knew, so the album sounded fresh and spontaneous. It was so much fun we recorded a tune a day and didn\'t argue once!\"\nFriends came in to add bass parts and strings and both Shoniwa\'s little brother (a semi-finalist on TV talent search sho