It’s not often that a band delivers both style and substance, and then keeps killing it over the long haul while making that tricky transition from underground acclaim to mainstream megasuccess. But Chromeo—Montreal duo David “Dave 1” Macklovitch and Patrick “P-Thugg” Gemayel—are doing just that. They’ve been plugging away at their sophisticated brand of ’80s electro-funk since their debut in 2004. And these days, they find themselves in the enviable position of selling out shows in Central Park, getting profiled in the New York Times, and seeing their platinum single “Jealous (I Ain’t With It)” take over Top 40 airwaves.

“I think that now we are at the stage with Chromeo where we can really be vectors and point our fans towards other things that interest us,” Macklovitch reflects, reached at a Chicago tour stop. “The idea is to make music people like—and while you get their attention, to stand for something. Have a discourse.”

A PhD candidate in French literature at Columbia, Macklovitch is a worldly intellectual.

But he’s also an emerging style icon. And an unapologetic smart aleck. And the most earnest of music lovers. (“Drake makes the best music in the world right now. Period. All genres considered.”) Add to that: he’s extremely savvy when it comes to digital media. To follow Chromeo on Instagram or to view its latest videos is to witness the most inspired of 21st-century branding at work.

All of these disparate elements, highbrow and low-, are, as Macklovitch puts it, “infused in the Chromeo project”.

Hence, you have the provocative title of the duo’s fourth album, White Women. “We were thinking that it was risqué, that it would get people’s attention, that it resonates with hip-hop, that it resonates with Helmut Newton [who published an erotic fashion-photography book of the same name in the ’70s]—but also that it sounds like a totally vintage Van Halen album,” Macklovitch explains with a laugh. “It’s so vulgar, but at the same time so cool, and so funny—and so wrong. That’s what makes it so right to me.”

It’s a heady mix. And it works. Take “Jealous”, an insanely catchy triumph of a pop song that somehow manages to fly in the face of pop’s ultra-macho tropes. “We always try to take different perspectives on love songs,” says Macklovitch. “You’ve got this theme of the crazy, vindictive, jealous woman already in music. We just try to go for a theme that doesn’t get talked about much. The castrated, insecure, powerless man was something funny to us, and we went with it.”

The song captures Chromeo’s magic: fantastic music, playful in tone—but fundamentally driven by real depth and a real curiosity about the world. It allows the band to be cool without being pretentious: effortlessly current.

And ultimately, this is the secret to the band’s longevity. “We’ve managed to maintain a level of interest that a lot of bands that started at the same time as us haven’t been able to sustain,” Macklovitch acknowledges. “We’ve been able to create a sense of novelty with each outing.

“In music, people are always drawn to the newer stuff,” he continues. “How do you do it when you came out 10 years ago—still excite people? It’s really, really, really hard. I think that with this album, we excited people.”

Chromeo plays the Vogue Theatre on Saturday (October 25).