One of Denmark’s best-known indie-pop acts doesn’t live in Denmark at all. Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo, who started the Raveonettes in Copenhagen around the turn of the millennium, moved to New York three years ago. Wagner has remained there, but Foo has since relocated to Los Angeles. The two collaborate by sending digital files back and forth, according to Foo, reached at a tour stop in London, England.

“It actually works out fine,” the bassist-vocalist says. “The thing that I miss is the time off working, when we would normally hang out. That’s when you have the time and space to come up with other plans and ideas, because you’re not in a work space, where you’re either recording or touring or doing press.”

Foo says that, although she loves living in the United States, she misses her Scandinavian homeland, and fears that she is slowly becoming Americanized. “I distinctly feel like a European in a different country, except that I’ve started eating with my fork in my right hand, and I can’t shake that habit off,” she relates. “That’s very American behaviour. In Europe, you always eat with the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right hand. But in the U.S., you eat with the fork in the right hand, and you don’t really use the knife.”

Table manners aside, the Raveonettes (the name is a composite of Buddy Holly’s “Rave On” and the Ronettes) have always filtered American culture through an outsider’s lens, sounding a little like a golden-oldies station blaring from a not-quite-tuned-in transistor radio. Early on, the duo was a high-concept band, working within self-imposed constraints. Most of the songs clocked in at under three minutes and boasted bubble-gum melodies coated in enough white-squall guitar to make the Jesus and Mary Chain jealous. All the songs on Whip It On (2002) are in the key of B-flat minor, while the whole of Chain Gang of Love (2003) is in B-flat major. The group threw out the rule book, along with most of the fuzz, for 2005’s Pretty in Black, opting for a brighter, broader musical palette.

The most recent Raveonettes outing, last year’s Lust Lust Lust, finds Wagner and Foo renewing their love affair with distortion and reverb, but right from the opening track, it’s clear that the duo has no intention of taking a step backward. “Aly, Walk With Me” kicks things off with a menacing, steadily rolling breakbeat from the Massive Attack catalogue and tops it with low-key chanted vocals and fearsome whorls of feedback.

“It took us a long time to find the direction of the album,” Foo says. “We really had a lot of material that we went through. We tried to record it with different sounds and productions. It wasn’t until we had the song ”˜Lust’, which became sort of the centrepiece of the album, that we felt like we had the direction. And that is a very atmospheric song. It’s dark, but it’s very tender and intimate, and romantic in some ways.”

It’s also good fodder for the argument that the Raveonettes should live in North America a while longer. As a matter of fact, I know of a certain city on Canada’s West Coast that would love to have them.

The Raveonettes play the Plaza Club on Saturday (March 8).