Champs (New band of the day No 1,641)

Hometown: Ventnor, the Isle of Wight.
The lineup: Michael and David Champion.

The background: Champs - two brothers from the Isle of Wight - make breezily melodic folk-pop that belies the sadness of the sentiments expressed in their songs. They recorded their debut album of heartbreak ballads Down Like Gold - due out in early 2014, perfectly timed to coincide with break-up season - in the Victorian seaside resort of Ventnor. We've never been there, but we can just imagine: is there anything sadder than the seaside in winter? "There's a lot of weird history there - there were a lot of smugglers," says Michael Champion, responsible for 50 percent of the tremulous harmonies and creeping melancholy. "It has an atmosphere. Ventnor is its own strange little world and the people that live there are almost a different kind of breed of humans." "It's got soul," adds his brother David. "There's always loads of interesting people there, just roaming about. It's not uncommon to see heavily bearded people carrying around huge bags of compost."

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Not that any of the songs on Down Like Gold are about heavily bearded people carrying around bags of compost, huge or otherwise. No, they're "about girls", explain Champs. There's My Spirit Is Broken - written, they insist, for Rachel Stevens, formerly of S Club 7 - or Pretty Much (Since Last November), which is about bumping into an ex months after you've split up and they're fine but you're still a crumpled mess. They're gone into their history in terms of musical influences in some detail and it involves the usual Beatles, with a few name-checks for Beck - the maudlin classic Sea Change (his best album, if you ask us), rather than, say, the one where he pretended to be a hot'n'horny Norwegian-Jewish Prince - as well as first-album R.E.M. and Fleet Foxes. There is a similar feeling of listening to white winter hymnals that you get with FF, and we can hear also hints of the early Bee Gees in the way their voices dovetail: they sound like choirboys fastidiously attending to the intricacies of enunciation. "We both love that sense of awe you get hearing voices in a cathedral," they say. "Just take away the religion…" Sometimes the voices are strange, as though they're foreigners trying to master English. On the title track they sound desolate. My Spirit Is Broken seems brisker - just call it uptempo misery. It's a bit Empire of the Sun: folk-ish with a production shimmer to connote a sense of wonder as a hazy layer to mask the sorrow. It comes with a video that follows the brothers as they run through the town performing the popular local past-time of "pool jumping" - jumping in people's swimming pools. It reminds us of Burt Lancaster's the Swimmer, with a similar sense of pleasure as a cover for the truth. Savannah is a figurative song about being engulfed. "I've never ever seen waves like yours before," they sing. Bet they say that to all the aqua phenomena.

The buzz: "Gorgeous, gauzy folk-pop."

The truth: Don't confuse them with the Vamps.
Most likely to: Lurch from one bad relationship to another.

Least likely to: Go to church.

What to buy: The single Savannah is released on December 23, followed by the album Down Like Gold on February 24 2014.

File next to: Sleepy Jackson, Beck, Empire of the Sun, Simon and Garfunkel.

Links: twitter.com/CHAMPSOFFICIAL.

Monday's new band: Ruen Brothers.