TWO sharply dressed twins pause to exchange a knowing fraternal glance before revealing exactly what it is that inspires them.

“I’m not going to lie – I write songs about women,” admits Erik Sandberg, the lyricist behind Glasgow indie-pop band Wake The President. “There are 10 songs on our new album, and they are about three or four different women. They say things to me and I steal them. That’s how our songs are written.”

After testing the water with their first record, You Can’t Change That Boy, Erik and his brother Bjorn (who weaves intricate guitar lines around those frank, erudite and erotically-charged words) seem poised to take the next step forward, following in the footsteps of Orange Juice, Felt and the countless obscure early-1980s bands they lionise.

Today, for the first time, the brothers are appearing in a photoshoot dressed identically, playing on “the twin thing”. “We got a bit of a shock when we saw Jedward,” says Bjorn, “because we were two twins in a band, and there were these wee pr***s aiming for little better than a slot in a hair gel advert. But I guess we’re heading in very different directions.”

While our boys insist they are making pop music, it’s definitely not the kind your average Jedward fan would want on their iPod. Literate, louche and charged with bookish sexuality, Wake The President are the latest incarnation of a Glasgow aesthetic that stretches all the way back to the halcyon days of Postcard Records. Imagine a Belle And Sebastian song where the men are itching for a fight and the girls aren’t wearing any knickers beneath their flowery dresses, and you’ll have a pretty good approximation of their sound.

Meanwhile, the twins have founded not one, but two record labels dedicated to working with Scotland’s finest musicians, both young and old. The first, Say Dirty, was named after a favoured phrase of one of Bjorn’s girlfriends and released albums by bands including Peter Parker and The Sexual Objects, the latter featuring Davey Henderson of The Fire Engines. Now they have founded another imprint, the collective We Can Still Picnic. Named after a lyric in Subway Sect’s song Stool Pigeon (“things are tough, we can still picnic”), the collective puts on club nights and releases records – including Wake The President’s second effort, Zumutung!, a German word that means impertinence.

“We started Say Dirty as a way of putting out 45s of unknown bands and then ended up releasing The Sexual Objects,” explains Erik. “It has to be vinyl, because I don’t really like CDs, let alone digital downloads. You need to have an artefact.”

Shy by nature, lead singer Erik is responsible for the intellectual direction of the band. After spending many a year “on the kangaroo” in Glasgow’s West End, he’s had plenty of time to soak up the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Neitzsche and the literature of Camus, which feed into articulate lyrics that sometimes seem to struggle with his own linguistic ambition. Filled with characters from the twin’s lives, the songs feature a cast of women including an art curator from London and the lead songwriter of a 1990s lo-fi pop band. Ultimately though, the love that really sews the band together is the twins’ fraternal affection.

“With a twin, you’ve got more history than you can ever hope to have in a relationship with anyone else,” says Bjorn. “We know each other intimately and we’ve been through our whole lives together.”

“There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think that it’s great having a twin brother,” Erik adds. “I do bump into people all the time – angry women mostly – who think I’m Bjorn, but the pros far outweigh the cons.”

The pair and their backing band were first signed to Electric Honey, the student-run label which released Belle And Sebastian’s debut Tigermilk. The result, You Can’t Change That Boy, threaded tales of deceit, lust and decadence to a soundtrack of jangling, propulsive, classic indie pop. For the new album, they have stretched the template much further and used choirs, strings and other orchestration to widen their sound.

The album’s inception was far from smooth, however. Bjorn and Erik had fallen out and, during one drunken row, almost came to blows, Bjorn flinging a drink in his brother’s face. “During recording there was weird s**t going on,” recalls Bjorn. “We were barely speaking and kept messing with each other heads. But it was better for all the things that were going on, because there’s an energy that was lacking in the first album.”

The pair were eventually corralled into the Chem 19 studio with producer Paul Savage, who spurred them on to attempt something bigger and better than before. “We swear by him,” Bjorn continues. “He told us we had nothing to lose, so we might as well just go for it.”

Meeting the handsome twins, you can sense their love of their craft, which encompasses not only their pursuit of a well-honed pop song, but also their diehard quest for the perfect-cut pair of trousers or a well-heeled brogue. They are sexy, youthful and almost certainly not the sort of men you’d bring to meet your mum. But isn’t that what we look for in our pop stars?

Wake The President play the Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh on September 15; King Tut’s, Glasgow on September 16; and the Old Bridge Inn, Aviemore on September 17. She Fell In To My Arms is released as a digital download single on September 26; Zumutung! is released in October