This may be the year the dance-floor dons return to jostle for the best album crown but it's also the year when a debut album, rather than any of the big noises from the usual suspects, will take your breath away. In the midst of monster releases from Orbital, Underworld, Armand Van Helden, the Chemical Brothers and even a mooted release from Leftfield, an album called Remedy from a laid-back duo called Basement Jaxx is the wow everyone wants to experience. Their rise may have been slow rather than meteoric but there has been a definite feel of the inevitable to it all the same.

A British dance album which redefines house music's parameters by doing more than merely twiddling with the treble or playing with the bass, the Basement Jaxx debut is the sound of house music finding its feet and realising that it's cool to have a good time once again. Rough, tough and jagged at the edges, it pulls garage, ragga, Latin, pop, hip-hop and R&B into the web to create the most exciting 57 minutes and nine seconds you will hear all year.

Remedy is also the sound of south London, the parish Basement Jaxx duo, Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe call home - their parties at tacky Mexican restaurants and in the back rooms of boozers-for-geezers have become the stuff of legend. Nights where people danced rather than posed, nights when dance floors screamed with delight, nights where the music was often neither mixed nor matched, nights when grade-A guest DJs played for love, not money. And the Basement Jaxx do-it-yourself ethic shone at the heart of it all. "It was raw, it was real," Felix recalls fondly. "We wanted to be underground and we were; so underground at the start that there was no one else there."

This soon changed as hundreds descended on odd venues in way-out locations around Coldharbour Lane in search of the ultimate party. These monthly events, the best indicator of what Buxton and Ratcliffe have created, are no more because the duo closed the club to avoid the inevitable trendsetters and bangwagoneers. Most people would have moved to a larger venue and coined it, but not these two. Instead, they closed down shop, went into the recording studio to finish their debut album and prepared to tell their tale to whoever would listen.

"I suppose it is time for dance music to change, to loosen up," Felix says. "The album is part of that process; it's telling a story, it's not just a collection of tracks we've knocked up in the studio. Each one of them has been through the mill with us. With rock and soul, you can enjoy the music because of the story the songs are telling. We may be doing dance music but we want to do the same thing, we want to tell a story."

Felix's background growing up in a vicarage in deepest England, Easter processions and Sunday lunch with the Bishop of Leicester may make for an exotic story but there's little pop in it. Thanks to a father who didn't allow Top Of The Pops (but who subsequently appeared on it, thanks to his participation in the video for the duo's Red Alert hit), Felix's initial introductions to music were sporadic and accidental.

But, by the time he met Simon Ratcliffe in 1993, he had made up for a lost youth and was under the heady influence of the house bug. At college, he spun the dance tunes at parties while Radiohead's Thom Yorke took care of the indie selections in another room. He may have graduated with a degree in engineering but he also had come through with a doctorate in dance music. "I was totally head over heels in love with it, especially New York house and garage. It did border on obsession. Did I want to be American? I suppose in some ways I did," he laughs. "But you have to remember that the music we were into and were producing was like nothing that anyone else was doing over here."

The favour was returned when the American DJ hierarchy fell for what the Jaxx duo were producing. Early EPs on their own label may have been designed to make it appear as if they were American imports to fool the British shops and DJs but the buzz began on the other side of the Atlantic.

FOR Felix, American house at the time was "sexy compared to the British stuff that was going on. The British stuff was all bang, bang, bang, very repetitive, very uninventive. But you couldn't work out what the Americans were doing, they were experts at disguising and layering and doing something new with something old."

Which is where Remedy comes in. Sure Basement Jaxx could not have made this album without the influence of their Yankee peers but neither could they have made tracks like the rocketing Yo Yo or the rinsed ragga racket of Jump And Shout or the crazy stoned beauty of Rendez-Vu anywhere else but Brixton. While American house is pristine and streamlined, Basement Jaxx tends to avoid any such production airbrushing in favour of a rawer, fuller sound.

Adding a punk rock rub to house music may have been tried and tainted before but Basement Jaxx's alchemy has produced a striking new sound. "I suppose it does sound quite English in a way. American dance music is classy and sure of itself, but what we've added is, yeah, a bit of an attitude, a bit of an edge, a bit of excitement. We're not trying to be something we're not. It's us, rather than us trying to be someone else."

In turn, the dance world has become totally enamoured with the 100 per cent real Basement Jaxx. The duo stare at you from the covers of music and style magazines, Red Alert has become a radio staple, and a visit to Dublin a few months back jammed The Kitchen to the rafters - an experience which is being repeated in various other cities around Europe and will be witnessed at the outdoor festivals this summer. The praise from other DJs and producers has been incessant from the off and now it threatens to go completely over the top. In 1999, it seems that Basement Jaxx can do no wrong.

"We don't want to be this year's fashionable thing," Felix is at pains to point out. "That's why we shut down the club nights in Brixton. We don't want to be the people behind the trendy album for this year and forgotten about next year. We have been doing this for six years and we have a good grasp of the big picture. We just have to hope now that other people see that too."

Remedy is out now on XL Recordings