From being just a Glasgow band with a grant, Sons & Daughters have travelled a long way. Practice has made perfect and the band's debut album is a showcase for their mesmerising chemistry. Singer Adele Bethel talks to Jim Carroll

MEET a band you're going to dig like a crackly old blues record. Onstage in a half-empty Ambassador, warming up for indie lightweights Idlewild, Sons & Daughters are snarling and seething with intent and intensity. It's like this every night when Sons & Daughters come out to play.

Here's a band with tunes to rattle your soul. The music snaps and thumps away, terse and tense coils of folky, bluesy country with all the dark roots showing. Then the two singers begin their twisted takes on tales from the shadows. The boy and girl sing high and low, a call-and-response duet with an odd, unpredictable, mesmerising chemistry at its heart. Songs of murder, death and dysfunction, these are love songs begotten by murder ballads and howling, cathartic confessions. These are songs which do not rhyme "moon" with "June".

Singer Adele Bethel has just woken up in a Parisian hotel room. The band are in the middle of a tour which will only stop when they fall over, start to cry and beg for mercy. Every day, they talk to people about their first full-length album, The Repulsion Box. Every night, they walk onto a stage somewhere and play songs from that album. No wonder the shows are becoming more and more dramatic with every passing week.

"That's the way it has grown," says Bethel. "Initially it wasn't so intense, but over the last four years, it's just gone that way. The more live shows we do, the more intense they seem to get. It's quite a good way of working out things that might be building within the band or whatever. The shows are ferocious, but at least they sound and seem like they mean something every time. Creating tension and atmosphere is really important to us." Open up The Repulsion Box with care and prepare to take a step backwards.

This is an album that grabs you by the throat and delivers short, sharp narrative bangs around the ears. Songs such as Medicine and Choked are smouldering kitchen-sink dramas where you hope (probably against hope) that someone has remembered to lock the knives away in a drawer.

"I suppose they do tell a story," muses Bethel. "It would be naïve to say that there's not a small amount of personal experiences wrapped up in those lyrics, not in terms of certain songs being about certain people, but more moods and situations."

Sons & Daughters hail from Glasgow, but their fierce, spirited, raw sound has little to do with what the prevailing musical winds are blowing our way from there. Although friendly with Franz Ferdinand (and now label-mates with them on Domino), Sons & Daughters were the ones buying the second-hand records no-one else was picking up on. "Glasgow is a great place to start a band, because it's pretty easy to get a gig and find like-minded people, as long as you're any good," notes Bethel.

You can certainly hear the gnarly influence of big, expansive record collections on every note of their work to date. Before Repulsion Box, there was Love The Cup, a mini-album low in fidelity but high in potential which was recorded with the help of the Scottish Arts Council.

"The council have funding to help out musicians with recordings," explains Bethel. "They're quite open in terms of who they give the money to because they've realised that there's an audience out there who will support new bands. They don't have unlimited funds and Scottish opera is dying at the moment, so that tends to get the bulk of the money.

"For us, it was sheer luck that we got the funding. We wanted to make something of our own, to make something which represented what we were about. Someone just happened to tell us about the scheme. The year we applied, four out of 40 applications got funding and we were one of the four." These days, reckons Bethel, the number of applications is probably much more, thanks to part to Sons & Daughter plugging the scheme at every available opportunity.

They didn't, however, go back cap in hand to the council when it was time to record The Repulsion Box, preferring to rely on Domino's largesse to fund that endeavour. Once the producer had been chosen - Victor Van Vugt, who previously worked with Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and Tindersticks - it was time to head to Cologne's Conny-Plank-Studio. There, in the same rooms where Brian Eno recorded Before And After Science, Kraftwerk made Autobahn and Ultravox recorded Vienna, the album took shape.

Bethel believes the album is very much the sum of their live experiences over the past couple of years. "We just went in, plugged in our instruments and recorded the tunes there and then. We had the confidence to do that and feel right about it. I think we recognised ourselves when we were planning the album that our live show was changing how we sounded.

"Of course, the sounds we had on Love The Cup are still there, but not to the same extent anymore. We hadn't played much live when we recorded the first album. This time around, we were a lot more experienced on that score." She also recognises that they made the right choice in Van Vugt as the man to pick apart their sound and put it back together again. "Victor was someone we massively respected and we were very aware of what we had worked on before, especially albums like Murder Ballads and Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. He had had a conversation with Laurence (Bell, head of Domino Records) a year previously about us and he had come to see us play in New York a few times, so we knew he was the right person to make the record."

From here on in, it's about coaxing people to see the band live and parting with cash for the record. It may look like a slog, but the band don't regard it as such.

"We know the kind of music we're making is not the kind of thing that is loved by everyone," accepts Bethel. "Of course we'd love to do well, but we don't want to change what we're doing to do that. What destroys a lot of bands is when they put themselves under pressure to make the music they think people want to hear. We won't be doing that, we will be the ones taking it as it comes."

The Repulsion Box is released today.