Following summer till the end of time - The true story of the Brunettes.

Above the tinny reverberance of the speaker phone, the voice of Jonathan Bree, shaggy-haired mastermind and lead songwriter of the Brunettes, is momentarily uncertain. He has reluctantly agreed to a phone interview, although he prefers to grapple with interlocutors via email. When the interviewer later plays back the interview tape, which hisses and yaws, he imagines Bree in a small, white room. He bows at the phone controls, the obsessive, frowning perplexedly at the questions that issue forth there. The subject of this particular chat is the Brunettes' newly released second album, Mars Loves Venus. Its songs finally patted into place by producer Edmund Cake, the album was recorded over 18 months in a string of bedrooms. But mainly, Bree says, the grooves were compiled at his flat in Kingsland, Auckland, where he rolled out of bed every morning to tinker with the tracks, and in a "cold, damp, cheap, dusty" garage owned by the parents of the Brunettes' nymphean-toned other singer, Heather Mansfield. Mansfield is also in attendance for the interview, but hers is a distant presence, at the edge of the microphone's reach. With her sleek, dark hair. In fact, the interviewer does not yet know that she is there. He obliviously clutches the other end of the phone, and rubs a new bruise on his shin with a vaguely satisfied wince. So he did do some damage, after all. As to Bree's reluctance: "I kinda À you know À I like À I just tend to get all À I try and À yeah À I just don't articulate myself very well when I have to talk about À you know, like À but I could try to answer some questions if ya like Ä"

But first the backstory. According to the liner notes of the Brunettes' debut album, Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks (2002), the paths of Heather Mansfield and Jonathan Bree first converged on the scorching sands of Ninety Mile Beach, at the "fiery" height of an Indian summer, the surf salvoing, the surf torpidly swelling (the notes don't say which) in the distance. Bree was a "frisbee hurlin' sidewalk surfin' highschool dropout"; and Mansfield "an innocent girl desperately running from her small-town ghosts". Mansfield grew up in Warkworth, attending her first school ball at the age of 14, partnered by the friend of her best friend's older brother. He asked her on the school bus. She cut her fringe herself. Her dad picked her up at precisely 1.00am. Neglecting to mention whether a stray "hurled" frisbee perchance played a role in that first meeting, the notes continue: "both [Bree and Mansfield] were at a loose end À but found they shared a common vision Ä to form the greatest bubblegum pop'n'roll band ever and follow the summer till the end of time as we know it". The end of time could conceivably sound like the inky, phosphorescent-tinged wake of "Cotton Candy", a song lurking towards the twilight end of Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks. It fades to the insistent wash of waves against a beach, and a tensely rising, discordant thrum À which swells unbearably, then abruptly slams shut. That first meeting was back near the end of last millennium, Bree later explains in an email, noting that he hasn't "been asked to tell the truth about our beginnings before". So, here's how it really happened. Mars first met Venus in 1998, at a gig on Auckland's Symonds St, at which Bree's band, the Nudie Suits, played alongside Mansfield's, Yoko. An amplifier's gentle static undulations may well have suggested the ocean's tremolo, and thus the imagined meeting on Ninety Mile Beach. "I thought she was pretty hot, but I was far too insecure to actually talk to her," Bree recalls. "It wasn't until months later when I called her up and asked if she would sing on some recordings of mine that we first hung out together. "I was obsessed at the time with Lee [Hazlewood] and Nancy [Sinatra], Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, and was writing songs like 'Mars Loves Venus' and 'Talk to Jesus'. I simply felt I needed to find a girl to sing and play these songs with."

The first song the duo collaborated on was the spiky yet mellifluous opening track of Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks, "The Moon in June Stuff", which begins with the needle's expectant crackle as it rounds the outer, music-less grooves of a record. This and other early "so-called bubblegum fantasy mini poperettas", Bree writes, were spawned in an abandoned bathroom in his flat "that nobody used for any wholesome bathroom activity as the water was brown and the rats had land issues". Despite the decrepit plumbing, and "unless the medication clouded the reality of the situation, I can safely say Heather and I clicked straight away. She was, and still is in my opinion, the coolest and most talented female vocalist [and] multi-instrumentalist in the southern hemisphere." An inaugural seven-inch EP was produced, meticulously engineered on four-track by Bree, also called "Mars Loves Venus", and featuring a raw version of the lurching dancehall pop of the new album's title track: "four chords, a comic book and an infomercial". Bree also attempted to record Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks on four-track, but his Spector-ish vision exceeded the dogged machine's limits. The results, he says, sighing, on the whimpering, wheezing interview tape, "just Ä just weren't good".

"Defeated", to quote from the band's mock-serious online bio, he took to working in a record store À "my only job really, apart from the Brunettes. It was a cool job, but I'm glad they fired me" À and also briefly experimented with the band's format. "I was very much into my Monkees. And I decided to write a pilot episode for a television show based on a group called the Brunettes, where Heather was kind of like the alien girl who came down. "Her ship crashed in our backyard when the band was rehearsing in the garage, and there'd be a song we'd play every episode. But TVNZ didn't like it Ä"

As the interview continues, the interviewer picks up the CD case; it had awaited him when he arrived, hobbling slightly, that morning. Synchronistically, like Bree's space-girl, he'd only just disentangled himself from the wreckage of his own crash-landing. Pulling through the streets on his bicycle prior to the interview, he had reflexively grasped the front instead of the rear brakes, then lunged purposefully at the footpath, coming to rest in front of a consternated postie. (Later it occurred to him that that very postie may have delivered the album, ascending and descending in his office's sinisterly silent lift, then continuing on his rounds.) Yet the crash was a prescient incident. Its unexpected, coruscating violence anticipated the arrival of Mars Loves Venus, which is jarring, schismed at its centre, like a skimming bike ride punctuated by an elegant, ridiculous somersault. "We like to play all the instruments ourselves," Bree says, "but obviously nobody in the band can play trumpet or "Theremin whistle," Mansfield says, out of the blue.

On the front cover of Mars Loves Venus she, bare-shouldered, with head turned, smiles upwards at Bree. He stares moodily back at the viewer, as if to deflect that competing gaze. The pierced red outline of a heart floats gauzily between them. Thus the loner narrator of "Polyester Meets Acetate" notices the priapic munters at school panting after a girl he also likes, and bitterly wishes "they would all just go huff paint instead of making plays for her". The harsh sentiment is suggestive of the album's uneasy, tensions, between an unrealised, ideal, slightly gawky love and the "ill-heartedness" of life in suburbia, the streets rounding off into asphalt lacunae, where weary lovers weigh up the escapist merits of a late-night movie. "It's unavoidable À it just happens Ä When you grow up, your heart dies," Mansfield breathes on the closing track, "Your Heart Dies". But if these tensions here throbbingly subside, elsewhere they inflame with vicious, catchy brilliance. "Loopy Loopy Love" swoops jubilantly into its silly electro-clash chorus, even as the two singers, playing vocal tag, cold-bloodedly line up Cupid in their sights, "'cause a Cupid causes love". And, at the album's tender, unhinged heart, "You Beautiful Militant" tip-toes in on pyjama-clad piano. The song, penned by guitarist James Milne, teeters on Mansfield's high-tensile voice, never more desolate or chillingly beautiful, before gyring into the sweet, shocking chorus: "You pick up your gun, And shoot everyone, You know what to do, To those who don't like you..." The effect is to send ripples of unease through the neighbourhood of surrounding songs; all change, change utterly.

The album's final verse evokes a desperately lonely seahorse. "I watched this documentary about seahorses," Bree explains. "After they find a partner, that's it, they stick together. If one of them dies, the other just floats around and waits for death and never eyes up another. Deep, huh?" After the interview, my bike bent, I accept a ride home in a friend's old car, with its long snout and rear flank corrugated from having groaningly rubbed against a fence. Lulled by the oncoming cat's eyes, we head to the suburbs, swinging on the unravelling rope of the road. The tyres thud. The wheels need aligning. The rain billows in the headlights, greenish, like plankton.