Delphic, The Garage, London

A warm welcome for the new order

It's the time of year when the best acts of the last decade morph into the hot tips for the coming year. As if new bands didn't have enough to cope with, what with increasingly desperate record company executives hurling out bolts of Olympian lightning when sales don't pass muster, they also have to stave off the restrictions of "hotly tipped lists", the repercussions of which are not so much an albatross, as a death sentence.

Delphic have been drip-fed into the public consciousness for most of the past 12 months. Their name started being bandied about on social-networking sites early last summer, ahead of their festival appearances, as people in the know were sent their work, invited to listen to it, and got to vote for it in the BBC's Sound of 2010 poll, the results of which were announced this week. Delphic came third (behind Ellie Goulding and Marina and the Diamonds). Pretty much every major music critic thinks they're what would happen if Jesus suddenly reappeared on Earth and got a record deal on the basis of sounding like New Order. So it's probably not going to be a massive surprise to say that they're good. Tonight, they mainly showcased tracks from Acolyte, their much-hyped debut album, released this month.

On the face of it, Delphic are insanely derivative. There are elements of euphoric house, math rock, new wave, a certain consistent song arc – what you might dub an electronic version of the Sigur Rós effect – which begins with soft picking and ends with triumphalist, celestial harmonies. At points, they sound like Friendly Fires, whose ethos of dovetailing dance, rock, and falsettos they could be accused of mostly closely mimicking, albeit in a less funky, more dance-oriented fashion. At other points, they evoke Interpol or Foals, even Duran Duran (as in the delicious "Submission"). The bass-line of "Counterpoint" sounds a bit like U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name". One minute they're razoring through hooks that might have aroused Gerard McMahon when writing The Lost Boys soundtrack circa 1987, the next they're channelling Brian Eno, William Orbit, Boards of Canada and the Orb to float into a layer of the outer atmosphere hitherto reserved for Virgin Galactic customers. Programming infuses everything they do – it's the kind of thing the Pet Shop Boys have made a career out of. Delphic sound like those remixes of indie tracks propounded by the Thin White Duke and Aeroplane, which you wished the original bands had done in the first place.

On the night of the Garage gig, it's packed. They run through what material they have from the album, though apart from "Counterpoint" much of it still remains relatively unrecognised. On stage, vocalist James Cook oozes thousand-yard-stare adrogyny, draping over the mic and wiggling his hips with his back to the audience. "Multi-instrumentalist" Richard Boardman reassuringly adopts the shoe-gaze posture; guitarist Matt Cocksedge tees up chords with such painstaking intensity that he looks like he's been put on the naughty step for playing a bum note. Any comparisons with Hot Chip are solely based, it turns out, on the fact that Cocksedge wears glasses.

The band hail from Manchester so say New Order comparisons are "inevitable". "Our album's got this euphoria mixed with a real Manchester melancholy, and I think that's something that does run through quite a lot of bands, from Joy Division to the Smiths and Elbow," they told the BBC. "There's always this post-industrial sadness. I guess everyone's just waiting for the sun to come out."

It's more than possible that Delphic's particular brand of post- industrial melancholia could be explained by too much Morrissey. But, lightning bolts aside, just try getting a ticket to see them a year from now.