Say what you like about the necessity of bands “paying their dues”, but you can’t argue with success. When a shaggy-haired Northamptonshire psych-pop outfit calling itself Temples landed its debut album, Sun Structures, in the top 10 of the U.K. album chart in February, its back story was not one of years spent driving across the Midlands to play dingy, half-empty clubs. In fact, the band, originally a duo comprising singer-guitarist James Bagshaw and bassist Thomas Warmsley, started recording before it ever set foot on a stage. Heavenly Recordings signed Temples in 2012 on the strength of four self-produced songs the pair uploaded to YouTube.

Fast-forward to 2014, and—dues-paying be damned—the bedroom-recording project is now a full-fledged rock band whose famous fans include Johnny Marr and Noel Gallagher.

Reached on tour in Paris, Warmsley notes that when he and Bagshaw recruited drummer Sam Toms and keyboardist Adam Smith, the newly configured quartet’s first order of business was puzzling out how to translate Temples’ multilayered Technicolor recordings into a convincing live performance. “You quickly realize the two things are very different arts, and both unique in their own form,” the bassist says. “While many bands will kind of hone their sound live and then go to record it, obviously we did that backwards.”

Based on the evidence offered on Sun Structures, the young men of Temples have built their sound using a blueprint drafted long before they were born. The disc begins with the eight-miles-high jangle of “Shelter Song”, peaks with the bang-a-gong proto-glam stomp of “Keep in the Dark”, and drifts to a close with “Fragment’s Light”, which sounds like the kind of music Syd Barrett uses to lull himself to sleep in his fairy-tale afterlife.

To owners of well-loved copies of Revolver, Fifth Dimension, and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, none of this will seem terribly original. On the other hand, the fact that Sun Structures evokes such comparisons makes it a remarkable achievement—even more so when you consider that the group made the record in Bagshaw’s bedroom studio, with no outside producer overseeing the process.

“With this album we had such a strong idea of the sound that there wasn’t any need for one,” says Warmsley. “We were able to achieve in our studio something that appeared to work. We just kind of stuck with that, really. I guess every song that we recorded, we developed even more, and sort of refined what we could do, and it seemed to work. That’s not to say that we couldn’t involve any other people in the future, but we’ll definitely always have a hand in the production, to whatever extent.”

Warmsley cites Dave Fridmann and Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember as producers he admires; no surprise there, given that each has a CV filled with what could be broadly defined as psychedelia.

If you’re wondering how a bunch of lads from Kettering discovered the lysergic sounds they love in the first place, you can credit the modern age. Back in the ’80s, the fresh-faced freaks of the Paisley Underground had to spend their days scouring record fairs and thrift shops looking for LPs by the artists they heard on secondhand Nuggets compilations. When it comes to seeking new sources of inspiration, Warmsley’s generation doesn’t have to do quite so much legwork.

“It’s so easy to listen to absolutely anything these days, especially on the Internet,” the bassist says. “You can quickly find things that are similar to a record you like. It just never stops, really.”

Temples plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Tuesday (April 8).