The Teenagers are assholes. Young, snotty, spoiled, afterpartying, chauvinist, hipster assholes. At least that's the impression you get from their music.

Their breakout single, "Homecoming," was one of the catchiest underground singles of 2007, an infectious teen-dream romance that came with an appropriately gauzy, softcore, super-8 video. The song is a he-said/she-said summer fling in the style of Grease, with the suave European protagonist hooking up with a vapid, tan American cheerleader—her: "I loved my English romance"; him: "I fucked my American cunt." Touché.

The song kicks off the Teenagers' debut album, Reality Check (due out March 18 on Merok/XL). The very next song, "Love No," finds lead singer Quentin Delafon mocking a nagging girlfriend before declaring, in the soaring chorus, "I'm not in love... but it's okay to stay with you." And there's a double-standard: "Fuck Nicole" scolds a girl for partying too much, doing drugs, and being a mess—the same complaints Delafon finds so irritating. The bittersweet "Sunset Beach" details a one-night stand gone wrong, concluding in the chorus, "This fucking bitch deserves to die" (to be fair, the girl stole the dude's Jazzmaster guitar).

All of which is probably taking the band, which began as little more than a joke, way too seriously.

"When people write songs, it's always a mixture of experience, imagination, and fantasy," says Delafon, on the phone from his London flat. "We haven't been living everything we've written about." Of "Homecoming," he says: "In Europe, and in France especially, we are hammered with American TV shows, American movies, and American music, and we get influenced by that a lot. That's where ["Homecoming"] comes from, plus just everyday experience with boys and girls and relationships."

Delafon doesn't seem like an asshole over the phone. In fact, he's a bit shy. He apologizes for his (not at all difficult) accent. He gets kind of sheepish talking about high school and previous bands.

Delafon, bassist Michael Szpiner, and guitarist/keyboardist Dorian Dumont grew up in the suburbs of Paris. Szpiner and Dumont became friends in junior high, Delafon met them in high school. In December 2005, after Delafon graduated from university and left Paris for London, the friends launched a MySpace page for what was then a fictional band. They wrote their first song ("Fuck Nicole") as a response to a MySpace message.

"We had kind of a false start," says Delafon. "We were like, let's make a song, let's do a band, let's put it on MySpace, but none of us really pictured being on a stage and actually performing the songs."

In the last two years the band has become very real: Their MySpace page has attracted over 60,000 "friends"; they've released singles on Merok, XL, Rough Trade, and Paris boutique label Kitsuné; they've toured England with CSS and Crystal Castles; Delafon has quit his day job ("we are Teenagers full time," he says); and now they're headlining their first U.S. tour, starting in Seattle.

For Reality Check, the Teenagers initially worked with Strokes producer Gordon Raphael—fitting, given the heavy traces of that band's stoned, monotone vocals and detached cool in the Teenagers' songs. But in the end, they recorded the album with LEXX, a producer whose recent credits include a remix of Björk's "Earth Intruders."

The result is a youthful pop masterpiece. Reality Check's dozen songs all adhere to the same basic, lo-fi pop template: metronomic drum machine backbeats, simple chord progressions, gleaming M83-lite synths, and spoken-word verses that give way to anthemic sing-along choruses. It's a winning formula, and for such patently silly pop songs, they're surprisingly difficult to shake.

And the Teenager's immaturity is mostly innocuous, cute even. "Starlett Johansson" is an infatuated Tiger Beat ode to the Lost in Translation ingénue. "Wheel of Fortune" ponders the important questions—"What if I hadn't been to San Diego/Would I have scored a cheerleader?" "If I had a unibrow/Would you like me that much?" "Would we still be dancing the same/If Michael Jackson had never made music?"—its dopey verses anchored by a genuinely sweet chorus. Theme song "Feeling Better" lays out an admittedly cheesy plan to "heal the world/to make it a better place for you and your friends," before launching into the chorus, "Who's there for you when you're cold and alone?/The Teenagers/The Teenagers." It's naive, it's egotistical, it's self-referential, but most of all it's just goofy fun. The song ends with some simple instructions: "Now that you're a fan/You can write our name on your body/Take a pen/Write it down: 'I love the Teenagers.'"

How could you not love these assholes?

The Teenagers play Sat Jan 19 at Neumo's, 8 pm, $10, 21+.