Black Peaches is not just a sextet, but in the mind of its skipper Rob Smoughton, a destination. Judging by their stellar debut album Get Down You Dirty Rascals, it’s where various strands of musical flavour and colour coalesce to form a heavenly brew, equal parts melody and groove, grit and bliss, sublimely tight and gloriously loose-limbed, which forces its population to dance and get down because it’s they have no choice. Plus it’s by far the best way to live.

Not just an accomplished session player (guitar, drums, keyboards) but a DJ with a crate-digging pedigree, Smoughton was a founder member London’s finest dance exponents Hot Chip and still plays with them live. He first conceived of Black Peaches in 2013 after setting aside his solo alter ego Grosvenor, “a sexy, ice cool international lothario” reckoned DazedDigital, making lithe, sophisticated blue-eyed electro-soul (he doesn’t even mind if you call it “yacht rock”). But if Grosvenor imbibed America’ eastern side (Philadelphia), the north (Detroit) and the west (California), by its name alone Black Peaches implies a relocation down south, starting with the symbolic Georgia peach. “But I wanted to imply something ‘other’ and rotten and weird,” says Broughton.

Hence Black Peaches’ sour and sweet mix; in the words of Smoughton’s advertised brand of DJing, “Swamp Soul, Boogie Voodoo, Country Funk and a heap more.”

“The music that got me playing guitar was bands like Little Feat and The Allman Brothers,” Smoughton recalls, “classic Seventies rock that leant toward blues but was also rhythmic and thicket-y, with two lead guitars. But it’s not enough to recreate it. I wanted to head further south toward Brazilian and Afro-Cuban rhythms, and repetitive guitar lines.”

Studying music at university, Smoughton specialised in minimalism. “It’s why post-rock has always appealed, and probably why I got into dance music. Black Peaches is taking that, laying a bed with the rhythm at the centre, adding on hookier licks… I guess I’m more of a maximalist!”

Black Peaches demanded a band format, “and I’ve never been in the right group of people before to make this music,” Smoughton says. His initial demos were sent to musicians he fancied roping in, like Nick Roberts, Grosvenor’s live drummer, and Charlie Michael (The Severed Limb, Shock Defeat) , a master of Brazilian percussion. Smoughton had played with bassist Susumu Mukai in (Hot Chip frontman) Alexis Taylor’s live band. Duelling guitarist Adam Chetwood, “is a fellow country and jazz fan, and he plays pedal steel too.” Thomas Greene (Cold Specks) on keyboards completes a consummate line-up that added ideas to Smoughton’s demos, which he took away and wrote more parts, while leaving room “like an elastic band” for a band jam “if it felt right.”

Inspirations include ‘70s Nashville combo Barefoot Jerry and their guitarist Mac Gaden, “that combination of southern soul and country coming together, with Caribbean or South American music seeped in.” Steven Stills’ first post-CSN&Y ensemble Manassas “were a blueprint in terms of Black Peaches’ line-up, with percussion and pedal steel.” Then from Brazil, the rhythm section of Baden Powell Sambas’ 1966 album Os Afro Sambas and the “double guitar attack” of the psych-tinged Novos Baianos, alongside Chicago’s funky post-rockers 5Style and Krautrock legends Can. After all, peaches don’t only grow in Georgia…

Lyrically, Get Down You Dirty Rascals is also a world of no fixed abode, but don’t expect Southern cliche: “There’s no mention of moonshine, armadillos, or the open road,” says Smoughton, “they’re nothing to do with me. Black Peaches is not homage.” Replacing Grosvenor’s “wordy, cheeky turns of phrase, the Steely Dan way of writing, Black Peaches’ words “are less knowing and specific, with more room to project onto.”

The album’s all-stops-out finale “Raise High The Roofbeams, Carpenters “ is a fine and intriguing example, sung from two sides of a witch trial: “the first verse is the defence from a woman accused of witchcraft, and the verse is the accusing patriarchs. I’ve always liked writing theatrically, and from another perspective than my own. It’s quite schizophrenic too, musically. The early guitars have a touch of western themes, the middle is disco like The Bee Gees’ southern recordings, and the guitar solo is a nod, I think, to a Frank Zappa wig-out!”

Between tracks too, Black Peaches pass through regions or seasons. Lead single ‘A Fire & A Water Sign’ is chunky Santana via Hot Chip’s pop nous while three shorter instrumentals are stand-alone vignettes that also act as scenic palate-cleansers between the longer passages of groove. ‘Chops on Tchoupitoulas’, Smoughton imagines, “is a stroll through a Bayou neighbourhood; you hear music, and you open the bar door for 30 seconds to have a look.” ‘A Rainbow Appears in Saturn’s Rings’ is a one-minute rush of drums, “like a rocket taking off, or capturing energy in space, without the typical trapping of using synths – which leads into another celestial being, ‘Hanging Moon’.” The ambient-minimal ‘Pomegranate Morning’ is the “red sky in morning, shepherd’s warning’ that follows ‘Suivez-Moi’, a hypnotic trance where Smoughton gets to practise his French for a Native American ‘calling the directions’ ritual.

In other words, Get Down You Dirty Rascals is more colourful, flavoursome and charismatic than even a Bayou neighbourhood - and equally a place, as the album title suggests, “to lose your inhibitions,” Smoughton declares. “That’s the kind of message we want to get over.”