‘I DON’T think there’s enough mention of heroes in pop music – people are trying to be too cool all the time.”

Jenny Reeve is speaking from Berkeley 2 in Glasgow’s Anderston the week before Fly Invisible Hero, her debut album as a member of BDY PRTS, is released. The studio is the usual practice space for the band, which centres on Reeve, known from her band Strike The Colours and collaborations with Malcolm Middleton and Jill O’Sullivan, vocalist for idiosyncratic trio Sparrow And The Workshop.

Now with a third key member – drummer/producer Jonny Scott, who’s previously performed as part of The Kills and Chvrches – the pair initially came together during a series of songwriting workshops in 2009/10 known as the Fruit Tree Foundation.

“We were sort of put in a room by Rod Jones and Emma Pollock, and it was like: ‘Maybe you guys could do something together,’” says O’Sullivan. “After that we’d always be ‘let’s go and write together’ but we’d always end up getting drunk and just having a nice time, so our friendship really developed. And then we got offered more gigs, and a little bit more, and then Jonny got involved and it’s all taken on another element. There’s more electro there and we felt we could start dreaming a bit bigger.”

As well as their strong friendship, Reeve and O’Sullivan have obvious creative chemistry: Fly Invisible Hero is a refreshing, surprising album that never outstays its welcome. Compact, pithy and entertaining, it’s the sort of record, like Screen Memories, the recent half hour masterpiece by Minnesotan medieval synth-pop alchemist John Maus (who plays Glasgow’s Art School on Saturday) where disappointment at one song’s ending is quickly relieved by another great track starting. With hints of The Knife-style avant garde, Alison Goldfrapp’s ambitious sense of scale and a hefty dollop of sophisticated late 1990s r ’n b (see album opener and 2014 single IDLU), BDY PRTS make slanted, fractured pop that’s chart-ready. They’ve already proved their popular potential with 2015’s Cold Shoulder, a spare, hip hop-influenced track that’s earned a quarter of a million Spotify plays, if very little actual earnings for the band.

“We do everything together, all the songs are by us both,” says O’Sullivan. “There’s a symbiosis. On the odd occasion that one of us brings something in to the other —which brings an idea that hasn’t been made in the room when we are both there – then it hasn’t really worked. It kind of all happens at once.”

Recorded at Scott and Reeve’s house as well as a log cabin on Loch Tay near Killin and mixed at Chem19 by Paul Savage, Fly Invisible Hero’s songs may span a few years, but the older tracks sound as fresh as they ever were.

“It’s not odd going back to older songs because we never accept that a song is complete,” O’Sullivan says. “We give it the space to exist in a more transient state. That means you can always work new things into them. Listening to our demos, you can hear how we’ve taken some songs on some mad journeys from first sounding one way to sounding a completely new way.”

Like The Knife/Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer and Goldfrapp, there’s a strong visual element to BDY PRTS’s work. The colourful video to current single Rooftops, a huge-sounding track which recalls the gutsy, lion-hearted pop of Kate Bush in her regal, early 1980s pomp, features choreography from Martyn Garside, a classically trained dancer formerly of the San Francisco Ballet, direction by the Forest of Black’s Ciaran Lyons and costumes made from pound shop hula hoops and – just what are those shiny ball-like things Jenny is wearing?

“I don’t want to give it away, I want to keep it within the realms of the video,” says Reeve, who explains she took her costume design inspiration from Lyons’s research into the dances created by choreographer Oskar Schlemmer and fellow artists Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky for the Bauhaus in the late 1920s.

She continues: “I wish I could say it was something totally amazing, some sort of off-Earth material. Let’s just say that I did. I think the ultimate for us is coming up with textures and shapes and colours which you can’t necessary equate to things that exist in the world of textiles. Or from wood.”

“The original costumes for the Bauhaus dances were made of wood,” O’Sullivan notes, before the pair share a giggle. On record, live and in person, BDY PRTS have a sense of mischief that’s both subversive and fun. That attitude stretches their creative range in ways not unlike Russian feminist punks Pussy Riot, whom BDY PRTS supported earlier this week on the Glasgow date of their tour of Riot Days, a performance art piece which centres on founder member Maria Alyokhina’s book on the band’s 2012 protest in Moscow Cathedral, and her subsequent incarceration.

“We’ve never taken ourselves too seriously, but that doesn’t mean we are not sincere,” says Reeve. “We are sincere. But what I think what comes from not taking yourself too seriously is an allowance to explore things in a way that you might not feel free to do if you were being very, very serious about things all the time. We both feel that in life generally there’s moments when you’ve got to take a load off and have fun. But realising that there’s a whole other side to that enjoyment; that you can still be sincere and have a good time – in doing so we’ve tried to play with that edge a little bit and challenge some themes that are close to our hearts, at least in terms of perception.”

REEVE, however, is quick to say that the band’s visual aesthetic is secondary to the music.

“We’re still a band and we’re very much about the music primarily,” she says. “So even though, if we had a huge production budget, we’d get canons in and suchlike, we always try not to take anything away from the music with the visuals. While a lot of what we’ve produced sounds quite polished, there’s still a DIY/punk ethic there.”

There’s a defiant, empowering tone to the album’s big pop tracks such as Take It To The Top, Shame and Warrior. An exceptional, stadium-sized epic, the latter would alone justify calling the album Fly Invisible Hero. The title came via Beatroute Arts, a community group in the north-east of Glasgow where the pair work.

“There’s a really cool young lady there called Linda Adams, and she’s a total one-off, a really individual thinker, even if she doesn’t know it,” says Reeve. “She’s really quite inspiring in lots of ways. One day she had written down what she thought my superpowers were. And apparently my powers were to fly and be invisible, and that made me a hero and I thought that was really cool. The way she’d written it, I had a red cape and everything.

She adds: “There was absolutely no pretension to it, and I liked the idea of that, even if you feel a bit transparent, or what you’re doing is only a small contribution to the whole, that it still matters.”

Saturday, November 25, The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 7.30pm, £8.80. Tickets: bit.ly/BDYPRTS_Aberdeen

Monday November 28, Madhatters, Inverness, 7pm,

£7. Tickets: BDYPRTS_Inverness

Tuesday November 29, Beat Generator, Dundee, 7.30pm, £7. Tickets: bit.ly/BDYPRTS_Dundee

Thursday December 1, Stereo, Glasgow, 7pm, £11. Tickets: bit.ly/BDYPRTS_Glasgow

Friday December 2, Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 7pm, £9.50. Tickets: BDYPRTS_Edinburgh

Fly Invisible Hero is out tomorrow via Aggrocat Records

www.bdyprts.com