Despite its name, and the fact that its latest album kicks off with a track called “American Dream”, Miami Horror is not from Florida, or the United States at all, for that matter.

Though originally from Melbourne, the band has called Los Angeles home for the past three years. And there’s something essentially Californian about the music found on Miami Horror’s sophomore long-player, All Possible Futures. Its shimmering synths, infectious beats, and shiny-happy-people pop melodies are redolent of endless afternoons spent bombing down the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible—perhaps a gleaming white Mustang like the one on the cover.

Beneath its high-gloss, good-time vibe, however, All Possible Futures isn’t all sunshine and palm trees. Even its most sonically exuberant number—the don’t-stop-till-you-get-enough disco party called “Love Like Mine”—features despairing lyrics like “A thousand days go by/I’m helpless on my own.”

At its heart, this is a breakup album, which Miami Horror’s Benjamin Plant notes makes it very different from its predecessor, 2010’s Illumination. Reached in the City of Angels, Plant notes that he had previously been reticent to approach certain topics in Miami Horror’s songs.

“You know, we don’t really like making music that’s political; we like to take people away from the world they live in a little bit,” he says. “So there was also that kind of ideal with love, and not making more songs about love because the world has enough of them. Then this album came around, and it seemed almost weird to write about certain concepts we had thought about on the first album. It seemed like we should really be drawing on the influences that we had, which were quite extreme—like, I went through a big breakup, and all loss-of-love songs suddenly make sense. You kind of have to go through that to understand them, and I think a lot of people in the world have, so I figured if we let our emotions out there, people would feel them.”

Miami Horror started as a solo project for producer and DJ Plant, but now operates more as a true band, and not just on-stage. Plant notes that Josh Moriarty (guitars, vocals), Aaron Shanahan (coproduction, guitar, vocals), and Daniel Whitechurch (bass, keyboards, guitars) each contributed to the creation of All Possible Futures.

“It was definitely more collaborative than the first album, by far,” Plant says. “I kind of ended up having to finish it, but everyone else definitely had a role in writing for it. I was a little bit more open to seeing what we could come up with together.”

What they came up with is a batch of songs, including the pastel-blazered new waver “Stranger” and the deep-house-informed “Cellophane (So Cruel)”, that are a perfect fit for your “Extra Grouse Aussie Summer Dance Party” playlist alongside the Presets, Empire of the Sun, and Cut Copy. It’s a surprise, then, when Plant says that getting rumps shaking isn’t really the point of Miami Horror’s music.

“It’s not been a huge priority to make anything dance-y,” he claims. “I like a good groove, which you can find in songs like ‘Love Like Mine’, but I wouldn’t say there were that many dance-y rhythms and grooves in those tracks. But maybe it’s also about other things, like how upbeat it is and the feelings it gives you.”

Miami Horror plays Electric Owl on Saturday (May 30).