You (should) know their history by now. No bandwagon jumpers these, The Whip's origins can be traced back to ill-fated indie-electro pioneers, Nylon Pylon, a band stymied by the usual major label bullshit. When Pylon fell apart, however, B ruce and Danny retreated, undeterred, to a damp, strip-lit and reputedly haunted cellar in a Salford pub to regroup. They spent six months dodging loose plaster and freezing their electrodes off in this self-imposed "boot camp", laying the foundations for The Whip. "It's positive, a little seedy," they say of the name. "It just sounds good."

If X Marks Destination is about anything, says Bruce, it's about, in a increasingly hostile world, craving precisely the escape that good dance music offers: "It's a celebration of freedom. Forgetting about shit, going out, having a good time. A lot of the lyrics are about struggling towards that freedom." And it is a struggle. 'Muzzle No1' or 'Trash', for instance, (the latter originally, "a long piece of bullshit all about spitting at people"), are very much modern, mixed-up dance tracks. They're cathartic anthems, that induce chaos on dancefloors, but there's nothing dumb or sappy about them. There's no upbeat rhetoric. Instead, they brim with a very 21st century sense of frustration and alienation. It's a Manchester thing, reckons Bruce: "There's an intensity, an industrial vibe to the city, that definitely rubs off on the music."