Even though the Asteroids Galaxy Tour isn’t a household name in North America yet, chances are excellent that the party-starting Danish outfit has popped up on your radar. Over the past three years, the Copenhagen-based act has anchored two high-profile ad campaigns, one for a globe-spanning beer company, the other for an insanely successful electronics manufacturer.

As a result of such exposure, the band’s core duo of producer Lars Iversen and singer Mette Lindberg has skipped the rock ’n’ roll rite of passage where you spend a couple of years playing shit clubs and dive bars. To illustrate how lucky they’ve been, consider their first gig. The late Amy Winehouse was smitten enough with the Asteroids Galaxy Tour that she had them open for her in Copenhagen in 2008, even though the group had never played live. Following that, Katy Perry signed up Lindberg and Iversen for stadium dates on her sold-out 2009 tour of Europe.

Such breaks go a long way to explaining why Lindberg is in a great place today. When the Georgia Straight catches her on her cellphone, she confesses to being sleep-deprived, rundown, and clueless as to which part of America her tour bus is roaring through. None of that makes her feel anything less than insanely lucky.

“Imagine this—we started to work on an album just because we loved music,” the outgoing frontwoman says between sips of Throat Coat tea. “That’s what me and Lars did. All we wanted to do was take all the things that we liked and make something that everyone could grab onto. Now we’re in a tour bus headed through the States. It’s like ‘How the fuck did that happen?’ It’s so amazing that we are being able to do this. We’re just this little band from Denmark, and here we have people in the States singing along to our songs.”

To answer Lindberg’s question of how all this happened, you have to back up a bit, before the group’s 2009 debut, Fruit, and the just-released sophomore outing, Out of Frequency.

Break number one came when the folks at Apple came calling in 2008, placing the Asteroids Galaxy Tour’s early single “Around the Bend” in one of their ubiquitous iPod commercials. If you’ve followedthe career of Leslie Feist, you know what kind of career-boosting exposure that leads to.

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour would get even luckier in 2010, when it was cast as the house band in a big-budget Heineken commercial titled “The Entrance”. It didn’t hurt one bit that said clip, which featured Fruit’s “The Golden Age”, was impossible to forget, the group performing in a swank mansion while a supermodel-hot dude goes toe-to-toe with a rotund Euro cowboy, an eye-patch–sporting archduke, and a karate-kicking Bruce Lee doppelgänger.

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, which plays live with hired guns, has been in high demand ever since, holy-shit moments including ringing in 2012 by playing to 100,0000 revellers in Hanoi. Savvy enough to understand that prime placement in a commercial can do far more for a band these days than a radio hit, Lindberg gives an honest answer when asked if she saw all this coming.

“Sure I did,” she says with a laugh. “We released our [Around the Bend] EP, and then we got the iPod Touch commercial. We were this small band from Denmark who didn’t even have an album out, and then suddenly we were everywhere. It’s been kind of difficult to understand how that created all this attention, because the iPod commercial never ran in Denmark. Same with the Heineken commercial—it’s not out in Denmark either. I’ve never actually seen it on television.”

That Asteroids Galaxy Tour has taken off won’t shock anyone who has thrilled to the group’s genre-mashing blend of spiritualized soul, cocktail-nation lounge, and jazz-tinged pop. On Out of Frequency, Lindberg and Iversen prove themselves nothing if not excited about life, whether dabbling in stoner-witch funk on “Theme From 45 Eugenia”, channelling ’60s-girl-group greatness with “Heart Attack”, or strapping on the skinny ties for the bright-eyed new wave of “Fantasy Friend Forever”.

Anchoring the whole stupidly infectious cocktail is Lindberg’s world-beating vocals. The singer proudly argues that she has no interest in playing it safe when she’s in front of a mike, instead pushing herself to step well outside of her comfort zone.

“I like singing, and I also like playing around with my voice,” she says. “I think it’s interesting to dare to go places that you might not think you should go. It’s like having a guitar with a whole bunch of pedals—you have to try everything. I can sing in so many different ways and go off in so many directions, which I do, so it’s fun for me.

“It really annoys me when someone says that everything that you do has to be perfect,” Lindberg continues. “I like singers with an edge, whether it’s Wanda Jackson or Michael Jackson.”

The latter, of course, was no stranger to the business of furthering his career with high-exposure commercials. A lot has changed in the music industry since Wacko Jacko was padding an already obscene bank account with Pepsi endorsements; the Asteroids Galaxy Tour is operating in a world where no one—with the exception of Nickelback—sells records anymore.

Now that Heineken and Apple have helped the Asteroids Galaxy Tour gain a toehold in North America, Lindberg says it’s up to the band to show the world it parties every bit as hard as it does in that mansion while singing “The Golden Age”.

“We’re six people on-stage with a horn section, and lot of people swapping around on instruments,” she says. “We’re a live band that really likes to let go, and, even though what we do isn’t always polished, we’re going to make sure that you have fun.”

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour plays Venue on Sunday (February 19).

Follow Mike Usinger on the Tweeter at twitter.com/mikeusinger.