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he three piece Australian band Cut Copy is the best thing to come off the island-continent since Mel Gibson and his alter-ego Mad Max.

Their catchy, dance-floor-driven singles are sweeping the world over and tormenting blogs from Bangor to Bangkok. On most sites they have been achieving similar praise to their well-received first album.

The band was formed in Melbourne in 2001 by Dan Whitford, Tim Hoey and Mitchell Scott. In 2004, they released their first album, “Bright Like Neon Love.” With the accolades that followed, they soon found themselves opening for various acts including Daft Punk, Bloc Party, and Mylo. In 2005 they went on tour with Franz Ferdinand, making a stop in the Twin Cities to play the Target Center.

In 2006 they were featured on the “Fabric Live 29” compilation, the recorded DJ set of their performance at the infamous London club.

Cut Copy is back on a world tour promoting their third release “In Ghost Colours,” which came out stateside April 8.

To recreate the sound of “Hearts on Fire”, Cut Copy’s new single, start off with Franz Ferdinand-inspired vocals, add some Daft Punk-influenced bass, then a mish-mash of Klaxons/Digitalism synth melodies, with ’90s house piano chords for good measure, and lastly, probably the most important part, a single soaring sax that sounds like it’s straight out of a 1980s Michael Douglas film.

A&E talked with Tim Hoey over the phone from his hotel room. He was nursing an injured back before playing at Coachella.

Heard you’re laid up in the hotel for the night?

I kind of just injured my back in London. I’m not sure exactly how I did it. It just kind of came on out of nowhere. I’m just doing my best to rest up. We’ve got a busy three weeks ahead of us.

What’s it like for Australian artists to break out onto the world stage? What is the response from Australian fans?

When we started we kind of always had the intention to take our music overseas. At the time, especially in Australia, the kind of climate for the kind of music we made, there wasn’t really a scene or an audience there at all. It was very much rock that was still ruling the bars in Australia – The Vines and Jet and stuff like that.

Initially it was kind of hard for us to get radio play and to get on festival bills, so we kind of always knew we wanted to take our records overseas. With the Internet it’s so much easier to get your music out there. It’s easier to build up an audience through things like MySpace.

It was certainly always our intention to not just be settled in Australia. It’s not that big, you know, you can only really tour the east coast of Australia once or twice a year, it leaves a lot of time left otherwise.

Do you think it’s very important to have a record released in a country anymore, considering how easy it is to get it on the Internet?

I definitely think so, because we have put a lot of time and effort into the packaging of the record, like the artwork. Even when people are downloading you’re never really sure of the quality of the mp3s you’re getting, and also with the new record we spent time writing interludes and joining all the tracks up together. It became this kind of one cohesive record and if people are just downloading bits and pieces they’re not going to get a good feel of what the whole record is about.

Yeah, I think it’s still definitely important. As far as getting people down to shows, there’s no way we would have been able to pull those kinds of numbers if it wasn’t for the Internet presence we have.

To hear more from the interview check out this week’s A&E podcast.