Widely tipped as one of the breakthrough acts for 2011, High Highs are about to deliver on that promise. Their self-titled debut EP, out in November, serves up four tracks of sparse, ineffable beauty, featuring exquisite falsetto harmonies from founders Jack Milas and Oli Chang, and an extraordinary blend of acoustic-guitar textures and synthesized atmospherics.

At once ancient and modern, intimate and otherworldly, ‘High Highs’ is so uniquely spellbinding, it’s sure to establish the young trio as pack leaders among 2012’s new breed, in advance of their debut full-length, due in spring.

Oli and Jack first started making music together as High Highs back in 2008 in their native Sydney, Australia. The pair met while working at a music production company, at the time Oli was performing in another band but was drawn to Jack’s purely acoustic style of writing. The pair hit it off immediately and soon plunged into a world of emotive songcraft and sonic invention.

“From the beginning,” says Oli, “our music has been about escapism. It gives us, and hopefully our listeners a chance to get away from their everyday lives. We definitely go for a ‘warm bath’ kind of sound.” The basis of the group always lay in marrying Oli’s interest in the electronic sound of heroes like Aphex Twin and Boards Of Canada, with Jack’s penchant for classic acoustic songwriters like Neil Young.

“There’s obviously a lot of scope for what you can do with a laptop and a keyboard,” muses Oli. “It’s more straightforward which palettes of sound work with acoustic guitar, drums and voice. That helps narrow it down a bit. In terms of creativity, it’s great to build walls around what you’re doing, like building a box that you have to work within. Everything has been done a million times over in a million different ways, so it’s great if you’re in a box, and you have to be really creative within that box, to make something engaging and interesting.”

For Jack, singing was not something he’d instantly been drawn to. “I just had so little confidence in my voice,” he humbly confesses, “so singing in falsetto was the only way I knew how to get any vague vibe out of it. I also have a very limited range in my chest voice, and so I had to sing in falsetto to get anywhere near where most people sing. I had no choice.” “For me,” adds Oli, “singing in falsetto, you don’t have to be confronted with yourself. Your speaking voice is you. With falsetto, you can become someone else. You don’t have to deal with listening to yourself, it’s almost like you’re listening to someone else – this high angelic sound. That’s like an escape in itself.”

With these tentative ideas hatching, the whole project was thrown into jeopardy in ’09, when Jack took an opportunity to work in New York. Six months later, though, Oli also relocated to New York. Settling in Brooklyn, the duo redoubled their focus on High Highs. There they joined forces with drummer/producer Zach Lipkins and the band became a going concern. “It’s awesome that Zach is a really talented producer as well as a great drummer, especially because a lot of the time the drum arrangements are really minimal and heartbeat-like. He really knows how to ride a gentle dynamic wave.”

Through summer 2010, Jack, Oli and Zach played around New York as a three-piece, which pushed them to build up their sound. “We signed with the Windish Agency, and they got us a lot of really cool gigs, which put us through the test of playing to some pretty crazy Friday night drunk crowds. That was interesting because we had to figure out ways to get this delicate, soft music to have impact in that kind of atmosphere. We’d be going on after a heavy metal band, or a synthy pop-rock thing, and it was like we had to match that in scale, and create a big sound, and cut through the noise. We realised there has to be scale and dynamics to the performance, within its small intimacy, because if it’s all too quiet and hushed and atmospheric, it doesn’t engage us or the listeners.”

From there, things started to move very fast for them. They became a blogosphere sensation, and were duly tipped for the top in 2011 by key authorities such as NME, The Guardian and Spinner. They soon hooked up with Elton John’s management company, Rocket Music Entertainment Group, who look after the likes of Lily Allen, Ed Sheeran, Oh Land and Friends, amongst many others.

Thus ensconced, High Highs were able to hone and complete their first tracks – not with the aid of some external producer, as they mixed and produced their EP themselves. But although they have amassed a great deal of musical experience in their day jobs, the band is a playground for them, where they can be as open-ended and spurious as they wish.

“I’m not really into writing some kind of narrative in my lyrics,” says Jack, by way of example, “they’re more just like impressionistic images. If you’re lucky enough to go down the rabbit hole of creating a song, you come out the other end, and the lyrics just kind of are what they are. Looking back at them afterwards, they could mean a whole lot of things. A lot of the songs are about being stuck in one place, and looking out. Then there’s some stuff about childhood, freedom, and sailing. I can’t really provide a further explanation, because I really don’t know what they mean. They’re just feelings.”

Similarly, according to Jack, the band was named fairly randomly, after a song Jack’s father played him once by Alabama indie-rock couple Viva Voce. ”We’re not paying the ultimate compliment, like we love the song so much,” Jack laughs. “It might be weird to call our band after a song I may or may not like. We just thought it sounded kinda cool.” “Plus, literally” adds Oli, “we sing in high voices”.

For all its apparent studied, slo-mo grace, their music is, they say, full of happy accidents, such as the remarkable ringing sound on ‘Open Season’, which is a celeste, a mandolin, a guitar and a piano, all playing the same notes in time. With further live experience accrued supporting Jose Gonzales and The Radio Department, the band’s career trajectory continues to spiral on skywards.

They’re not afraid, however, of the pressures that success may bring to bear on them: after all, they’ve been making music to order for some years now, they’re used to that kind of stress. And the attendant rigours of touring aren’t too big a worry, either. Quite apart from them both having crossed to the other side of the world to realise their shared dream, Oli has already travelled the world substantially: born in Sydney, to an Australian mother and a Chinese father, when he was aged 8 his family moved to Bangladesh for three years, and then moved around Asia, till he was 19. He then shuttled between Oz and Japan till High Highs fully convened in Brooklyn.

Right now, the trio are enjoying the popular confusion about where they should be pigeonholed. “People have compared us to Simon & Garfunkel,” says Oli sceptically, “because we’ve got that very quiet singer-songwriting thing, but with the harmonies and an occasional borderline-psychedelic sound. My friends have also jokingly said we’re like an ambient Hall & Oates, but I don’t know if there’s anything in that.”

Probably not, but High Highs’ warm bath really doesn’t need a category. You just jump right in, and enjoy.