The sound of many hands clapping

Sometimes an album sounds that bit special even before it reaches your speakers - something about the sleeve art, the band name or, increasingly, the online chatter assures you of the cut of its jib. The debut from Brooklyn-based Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is just such a record, destined to be among the best of 2006.

Echoes of an older, weirder America filter through a host of hip influences, including the Velvet Underground, Talking Heads and the Magnetic Fields. Meanwhile, what look like vaporising water babies, illustrated by the keyboardist's girlfriend, cavort demonically on the cover - a clue not only to the allusive drift of the songs (about innocence gone astray), but to their DIY production.

Initially, the band financed and distributed the album themselves, shifting 25,000 copies via their website. Now, thanks to this enterprise and sold-out gigs on both sides of the Atlantic, they are in a similar position to Arcade Fire, 2005's crossover indie success story. The bloggers, David Byrne and, most significantly, HMV have tipped them as the coming art-rock sensations, but the lead singer, Alec Ounsworth, dismisses that excitable talk.

"Reducing something to a classification of any sort is worse than lazy - with music more than anything," he says, over a pint, during a pre-Christmas UK tour. "People act like they've ordered their food and are already looking for the door. I know the hype may drop off, but music will never drop off for me. I've always worked hard at what I do."

On stage, everything revolves around this tersely focused front man. The rest of the group - the dependable drummer, Sean Greenhalgh; softly spoken twins Lee and Tyler Sargent (guitar and bass, respectively); and the puppyish Robbie Guertin on keyboards - orbit at a respectful distance. While claiming he enjoyed his spare time in chilly Nottingham, Ounsworth is clearly not here for the sights.

He gets tetchy about living in "the age of the Strokes", when bands are lauded for their dress codes as much as their chord changes, and recalls how he once snapped at a fashion journalist. "I said, 'How can you have the nerve to ask me if style is more important than music?' As if this paint-splashed sweatshirt was carefully chosen - I've had no clothes for about seven years." Faced with the garment in question, I believe him. In fact, his songs conduct a low-intensity war on the apostles of cool. "You look like David Bowie/But you've nothing new to show me," he quips on Over and Over Again (Lost & Found); Let the Cool Goddess Rust Away is another title.

In contrast to the work of po-faced peers, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's album begins and ends in barminess: a groggy fairground prologue that could be Captain Ahab at Salem's county circus, and a near-hysteric blather (Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood) about the vampiric fate awaiting child stars. Ounsworth wrote most of these songs before the group started, and you can find demos on his website, www.flashypython.com, where he is pictured, scruffy, in a woody glade. The photo adds to the impression of a man apart: his bandmates live in New York, yet he remains in Philadelphia. "Philly is comfortable for me," he says. "If I lived in New York, I wouldn't be part of the ultra-cool scene. That's not to say those are bad people, but there's a sense of trying too hard."

With a galloping bass line, The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth is the band's standout tune. It's touched by a semi-delirious exuberance that moves mind and feet. "You gotta hold onto those yellow country teeth, in the sense that you gotta remember where you came from," Ounsworth smiles, his own dentistry apparently fine. "Everybody in the city came from somewhere, a more humble existence."

It's his wry morals that bring Ounsworth closest to Bob Dylan, his favourite live performer. He knows that certain lyrics ("Whatever happened to our heavy metal?/Whatever happened to our coat of arms?/We find that we're stuck in the middle/Picking up the pieces of our hearts") can be read in the context of Iraq, and though both artists say they do not pen "protest songs", Ounsworth admires Dylan for "being honest, never didactic". He explains: "Some of my songs approach the idea that nobody can tell you how to act in any particular situation. If anybody does, then they're probably not very trustworthy or honest with themselves."

After his earlier exposure to British audiences, Ounsworth confesses that he was a little thrown by our "come on, impress us" attitude. Next month, when he returns, he should be welcomed with open arms. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah had better get used to the applause.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is out on January 23 on Wichita; the tour begins on February 3