HOLYCHILD formed in college, found their artistic inclinations were in sync, and began making music together. Sure, there’s more to that story—a long trail of events that stretches from New York art galleries to the sun-baked streets of Los Angeles, where the duo now lives. But both members, Liz Nistico and Louie Diller, are far more concerned with the “why” behind their twisted electro pop creations than the “how” of where they are today.

Although in the past they have described their music as the halfway point between Katy Perry and Björk, the pair is more likely to name-check F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Bukowski when describing their glittery dance tunes. The classic authors subverted the written form in order to make readers question their assumptions—why can’t they do the same thing with music? HOLYCHILD call their genre of music, brat pop. Their manifesto is simple but intense.

“It’s experimental pop, it’s often sarcastic, and it’s pretty thick with social commentary,” says Nistico. “If you make music within pop form, and just having poppy melodies, people are used to consuming that. People will consume that easily with no difficulty. If you are saying something beyond that, that’s when you can make people think. We definitely want to reach a very large audience and make them think differently, whether it be about gender roles, or the social economic status of the U.S. right now.”

But don’t expect HOLYCHILD to waste too much time preaching. From touring alongside the likes of Passion Pit and MØ, to turning NYC’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) into an electro pop rave, they’re out to make the kind of music that’s aimed in equal parts at the intellect and lust.