Joshua Wells has been flexing his multi-instrumental skills for crowds for decades, but arguably might be most recognizable behind a drum kit. Whether handling effortlessly intricate patterns with postpunk revivalists Radio Berlin, or slamming out earth-fracturing stoner grooves on a global stage with Black Mountain, the guy’s clearly got crazy rhythm. He’s still cooking up beats in his latest project, Sur Une Plage (the name is French for “on a beach”), but the local musician notes that he’s relished dropping the sticks this time around to make equally entrancing, if inorganic, rhythms on an MPC2000 drum machine.

“I like fake drums,” Wells tells the Straight through a boyish grin from a bench in the middle of East Van’s McSpadden Park. “I like working with a palette that’s decidedly fake. When I work with electronic instruments, I don’t want anything to sound real, it should sound entirely synthetic. And that’s great! You can just do things with a drum machine that are different—they don’t have feel, per se, but you can work with those elements of roboticness.”

Fittingly enough, frontman Colin McKill is vacationing in Venice Beach with his girlfriend when the Straight contacts the act for an interview, but the bright weather in town isn’t treating Wells too shabbily. With his corduroy sherpa jacket unbuttoned all the way and the early March sun bouncing off his tortoiseshell Ray-Bans, the keyboardist-programmer details how Sur Une Plage warmed to the idea of juxtaposing cold, machine-made beats against McKill’s cozy, fleece-lined vibrato.

Sur Une Plage started up in 2013 after McKill had already been singing, and playing violin and guitar, in Lightning Dust, Wells’s long-time project with fellow Black Mountain member Amber Webber. Off-stage, they were bonding over Kanye West, Jay Z, and the sounds of southern trap music, while Wells adds that he had also been getting into “more skeletal, early synth sounds”. From there, the pair decided to “just do something ridiculous” with that array of influences.

An early writing session at Wells’s Balloon Factory studio led McKill to plunk out a piano melody that would become the hook to “Sins”, their first single. Originally issued over Bandcamp last spring, it’s now the leadoff track to the group’s newly self-released full-length, Legerdemain. Wells reworked his bandmate’s tune into a tapestry of undulating analogue-synthesizer tones. Above the revamped arrangement, the vocalist takes stock of himself with softly sung reflections like, “The time has never been so right to find out what is wrong and make a change.”

Next to land was “Restaurant”, a track whose orchestra of automated arpeggios and motorik beats would place Sur Une Plage in good company on an early-’80s electro-pop playlist rather than on a mixtape with Migos or Gucci Mane.

In addition to keeping in line with the sonic stylings of Yaz and the Eurythmics, Wells also takes an old-school approach to Sur Une Plage by manipulating a variety of sequencers and keyboards instead of triggering everything with the press of a laptop’s space bar.

“A lot of the gear I use is old, but not all of it,” he asserts in relation to his on-stage sleight of hand. “Basically, I just work with stuff that I can touch. The digital realm is all just for recording, for documenting things.”

Though Sur Une Plage can easily get the floor going with pumped-up tracks like “Restaurant” and “Dancing Drugs Get Out!!” (the latter featuring a frenetic fit of free-jazz-leaning programming), Wells believes the band’s forte is actually its ballads.

“There’s a real element of humanity in this weird, cold, robotic music,” he notes, pointing in particular to the passionate lyric work of bandmate McKill. “That stuff is all very personal to Colin. He really wears his heart on his sleeve, and I’ve got to hand it to him, that’s something I can’t do. I can accentuate emotions with colour and timbre and harmony, but I don’t really touch on the real shit.”

Despite the sweetness of McKill’s croon, he brings a sense of hopelessness and despair to the fractured relationship narrative of Legerdemain’s “Love Machines”, hitting the emotional climax with a quivered “each war requires a bloody end.” “Marathon” raises the stakes without rushing the pace, with Wells adding layers of melancholic melodies across a near-six-minute soundscape as McKill offers hushed and crestfallen observations surrounding a love “dead and gone”.

It’s human moments like these that subvert the synthetic feel of Sur Une Plage. Though Wells’s musical arrange­ments thrive on artificial sounds, we haven’t come to where McKill’s performance could be convincingly emoted by an automaton.

“I guess the main thing about our band is that it’s meant to be this robotic, synthetic thing, but it’s at odds with the songs themselves,” Wells says. “The songs are classic, emotional pop songs about love and self-hatred and fear. That’s what makes it compelling for me.”

Sur Une Plage’s Legerdemain will be released through the band’s own Party Product record label on Tuesday (March 17).