When it's suggested to the members of Beast that they sound nothing like the acts that have made Montreal a hipster haven, the response sounds suspiciously like something you'd hear from Beldar and Prymaat Clorhone, better known to their neighbours as the Coneheads.

"We're from France," Jean-Phi Goncalves, the male half of the Montreal-based duo says, on the line from an Ottawa tour stop. "Both of us. So our influences are somewhere else."

One listen to Beast's just-released, eponymous debut backs that up. Synths are obviously the favoured musical weapons of Goncalves and singer Betty Bonifassi, placing the expats miles away from the guitar-based indie rock of the Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade. But where most modern-day microchip jockeys want to be the reincarnation of New Order or Talk Talk, Beast aims for something decidedly more '90s-flavoured. The two collaborators file themselves under "experimental/trip-hop" on their MySpace page, which has gotten them pegged as the second coming of Portishead. And that comparison is certainly valid enough on tracks like the reverb-saturated "Microcyte".

"Jean-Phi and I come from France and are the same age, and France is really, really inspired by what happened in Britain," Bonifassi offers. "Those influences, of course, end up making their way into the music."

At the same time, Beast's record collections don't start with Dummy and end with Roseland NYC Live. "Finger Prints" is electro-industrial bombast spiked with Nine Inch Nails–strength guitar shards, "Satan" leads a southern-gospel choir astray through the land of downtempo blues, and "Out of Control" laces jazz-tinted spawn-of-Shirley-Bassey vocals with spy-soundtrack guitars.

As obviously in-synch as they sound on Beast, Bonifassi and Goncalves never planned on being bandmates. The project started as a one-off single, the hip-hop–leavened "Devil", with Goncalves (a veteran producer whose credits include Lauryn Hill) hooking up in the studio with Bonifassi, who was previously famous for providing the singing voices for characters in the animated film Les Triplettes de Belleville.

Today, the two are shocked at the way Beast has built a buzz for the band, and not just in Montreal.

"We were scared when we were making this record," Bonifassi says. "We didn't know how people were going to take it. There was pressure because we'd worked with people who were known. I'd done a couple of projects that went well”¦"

Goncalves breaks in: "It was like, ”˜Why are you stopping everything you've got going to do this?' This was our first album on our own, where we weren't producing something else or singing for someone else. We were naked, which is why we're so happy that it worked out."

Almost as well, evidently, as that move to Montreal from Remulak. Errr, I mean France.

Beast plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Saturday (March 28) as part of JunoFest.