Rave against dying and the light

In the Harry Potter books, the geeky little wizards-to-be rot their teeth with a candy called Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans. Jelly Belly manufactured the confections for the real world, in flavors like ear wax, skunk spray and vomit. If pop music is candy for the ears, then the Raveonettes are its strawberry and booger jelly beans.

The Danish duo’s fourth and latest album, In and Out of Control, is pure bubblegum, if blown through the bone lips of the grim reaper. Soft, fuzzy hooks and angelic vocals cushion tales of overdoses, suicide, abused cats and larceny. There’s a straight-faced song called “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed).” It sounds like a Pink Ladies sing-along in Grease.

“If you do an incredibly poppy song that sounds like a day at the beach or hanging out with the Beach Boys, you don’t want some ‘ooh, girl, I like you’ thing,” head Raveonette Sune Rose Wagner explains over the phone from his New York home. “That’d be nauseating.”

The boy-girl band has always skated the line between happy ’60s pop and cool shades-on-stage noise, but the new record widens the gap between sugary melodies and bleak themes. “The whole notion of contrast is very appealing to me,” says Wagner—a black-haired aesthete whose musical partner, Sharin Foo, a part-time model, sports a shocking snow-white bob. “That’s why you add lyrics about drug addiction,” Wagner says with a laugh. “It spices it up.”

After recording their prior album, 2007’s Lust Lust Lust, in Wagner’s Chelsea apartment, the twosome worked with pop producer Thomas Troelsen in his swank Copenhagen studio. Troelsen has teamed with infectious plastic Europop acts like Aqua (which you likely remember/curse thanks to “Barbie Girl”); he also had a heavy hand in crafting Junior Senior’s D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop the Beat. (The Raveonettes just completed construction of their own studio in Brooklyn.)

Wagner, 29, says he draws his dark lyrics from his own experiences and those of his buddies, family and girlfriends. As a child, the multi-instrumentalist spent a lot of time on his own, “daydreaming, studying and researching for what was to be my later life,” yet he hardly comes off as solemn and gothic. No, he’s up early in the morning, matter-of-factly telling us that at an early age he had “an unfaithful father figure” as well as a close relative who committed suicide and another who died in a car crash.

We ask if he finds his life atypically gloomy. “A lot of people have had a friend or relative who’s been raped or beaten up,” he says. “To me it’s not very strange to write about. It’s everyday life.” Wagner refuses to buy into some stereotypical Scandinavian temperament educed by long arctic winters. (“It might be genes,” he speculates.) Besides, the itinerant Dane left his homeland at 18 to live in Seattle, Los Angeles, the U.K. and, for the last five years, New York. A similarly restless spirit drives his songwriting: Wagner claims he writes and records four to five songs a day, “some of them just to hold on to.”

Though we prod, the black-clad musician is reluctant to give more details on his inner demons. When asked if he’s had a near-death experience, he responds, with typical stoicism, “Yeah, many of times. From drinking, drowning and all those bad things in life.” Drowning? “It was a surfing accident, that’s all I can say.” The aversion to purely sunshiny vibes is starting to make sense. In the video for the gorgeous new single “Last Dance,” an Avalon and Funicello–esque couple frolic on a fake beach, feeding pizza to seagulls. A raven puppet sings ooo-we-ooo harmonies.

Unsurprisingly, the Lollapalooza vet is no fan of summer festivals. “I hate playing outside in the sun,” Wagner says. “We need a dark room.”

The Raveonettes rock a dimly lit Metro Sunday 25.

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