This story begins like all other sagas just like it: They formed a band. Imagine the squeaky play button of a Sony Cassette Player pressing down into place as we chart the genesis of Art Brut, the London pop group formed to fulfill their destiny of writing a song with the same reach and popularity of “Happy Birthday.”

On the other hand, main man Eddie Argos once claimed, “One of the main reasons I’m in a band is to watch other bands for free.” The choice of myth is yours.

Whatever their mission, Art Brut were aided by the taste-making scribes at Pitchfork right around the time the phrase “The Pitchfork Effect” was entering the indie rock lexicon. This was 2005, the height of the Chicago website’s ability to break new artists, so bestowing the band’s debut album Bang Bang Rock & Roll with a 9.1 score – and, later, ranking it the third best LP of the year – was the kind of boost that every indie kid armed with a cheap guitar was dreaming of.

Everyone around Argos was excited about it, and maybe he would have been too if he wasn’t an extremely offline person. When promotional commitments demanded it, Argos would trek to the McDonald’s on Kilburn Road and put coins into a public computer that would drip him some precious internet. (It’s a funny thing, then, that the computer-unsavvy singer ended up writing a regular blog for The Guardian in 2007.)

Argos’ dreams centered not on websites and blogs, but Top of the Pops and the New Musical Express. Except Top of the Pops only had about a year left in its original run, and NME was navigating the downfall of print by seemingly searching for the kind of cover bands not named Oasis that could sell copies.

This was definitely not Art Brut, five kids who embraced a kind of English art college hipster nerdism, performing songs about experiences that typically occur when the second bottle of cheap red wine has been opened. Arriving at the intersection of all these different eras, they comfortably fit nowhere.

Even the decision to hide a song in the pregap of the CD edition of Bang Bang Rock & Roll felt antiquated. (Remember those? When the first track needed to be rewound to hear the song?)

And yet, Art Brut evidently struck a chord with listeners who wanted smarter music than what most landfill indie bands were serving, but weren’t above monster choruses. They seemed tailor-made for an audience who could register in Argos their own High Fidelity existence of obsessing over music and girls.

The singer’s fantasies of miming UK top 40 singles in a BBC studio reflected his artistic philosophy – it’s about pop music and what happens when kids discover it, are captivated by it, and enlightened by it. It’s about the moments that happen when pop songs play in the background, and how they linger in our ears and in our lives.

Two decades on from their formation, the time is right to revisit Art Brut and hear them outside of the distinct context in which they first operated. And lo and behold, the band have a new five CD box set (because it simply had to be on CD) titled And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice! that fully charts Art Brut’s first two albums, plus the career-spanning double compilation LP A Record Collection, Reduced To A Mixtape, both of which are set for release on July 5 via Edsel Box Set and Demon Records.

Argos’s first attempt devising a group was The Art Goblins, simultaneously a “Dadaist art band” and “the sound of young Dorset,” whose on-stage antics included the singer escaping from a sack and playing the vacuum cleaner. The inspirations included the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and David Deviant & His Spirit Wife, idiosyncratic influences which would later seep into Art Brut.

The inception of Art Brut occurred at an afterparty hosted by indie duo Ciccone, when Argos approached fellow carouser Chris Chinchilla and asked if he’d want to put a band together. Chinchilla figured it was a chance to play his guitar and meet girls, so he signed up, and his flatmate Frederica aka Freddy Feedback was talked into playing bass, which the guys sourced for her off eBay.

Argos’ friend Ian Catskilkin, a guitarist formerly of a heavy rock band Orco, had recently moved from Bournemouth, so he was in. That just left a drummer – always the hardest instrumentalist to recruit.

Destiny danced when a friend of the band overheard a German man on a bus telling someone he played drums and worked in Merc, a clothing store on Carnaby Street. So, they tracked the man, Mikey Breyer, down and asked him to join the band, completing the inaugural lineup.

All they had to do now was to tell their tale. And before we go any further, let’s just get this out of our system: FORMED A BAND, WE FORMED A BAND! LOOK AT US, WE FORMED A BAND!

Damn, that felt good. Art Brut’s signature tune, the ultimate telling of why small cadres of kids will never stop jamming together, still hits you in the gut. “Formed a Band” went through a couple of different iterations (really, it’s still mutating, as Argos tends to update the lyrics when performing it live).

The earlier version of the song – which has come to be named after its producer, the “Early Keith Top of the Pops Version”, or the “Brutleg” – was released in November 2003 on a sampler set to promote Angular Recording Corporation, a gutsy label that also worked with The Long Blondes and Klaxons, among others. Argos believes that was the second take, with him still making up the words as he went: “I want to be the boy… the man.”

“So, we weren’t really ready,” says Argos. “We didn’t have a manager. We didn’t have anything, really.” Nonetheless, this version of “Formed a Band” was released as a single on March 29, 2004, by Rough Trade Records. It reached number 52 in the UK Singles Chart, not quite enough to catapult Art Brut onto Top of the Pops.

“Formed a Band” was re-recorded for Bang Bang Rock & Roll under the watch of producer John Fortis. The canonical version delivered on the band’s early promise, with Argos sounding more comfortable on the mic, attacking every bar with the gusto of a competitive slam poet.

His delivery – heavily accented and conversational, yet melodic and memorable – would be the band’s defining characteristic. (“And yes, this is my singing voice,” he assures us on “Formed a Band”. “It’s not irony, it’s not rock and roll/ We’re just talking to the kids.”)

Like a garage-spawned combination of Ray Davies, Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker, and Gaz Coombes, Argos cheers and yelps dry observations over crunchy guitar riffs that somehow glorify pop music without taking it too seriously. Other times, he’s just being honest about his floundering performances with women.

To manifest its first songs, the band would thrash out long instrumental pieces and, according to Argos, he would simply say things over the top of it to fill up time. “Sorry, not to fill up time,” he corrects himself. “It was art.”

Bang Bang Rock & Roll is the classic debut album outline: it represented every song the band had to their name. To overthink it would have been impossible. “18,000 Lira,” “Rusted Guns of Milan,” “Stand Down,” and hidden track “Subliminal Desire for Adventure” were originally written for a concept project about Marxist-Leninist militant Enrico Gatti, filling the album with Italian references which inadvertently give it a film drammatico cool.

Their debut album earned Art Brut fans and plaudits, but it didn’t make them famous. For their follow-up album It’s a Bit Complicated, Argos retained his ability to wander through the world with an eye for the minutiae that makes up a comfortably normal existence – “Sound of Summer,” for example, is about making mixtapes.

Chinchilla had by now left the group and was replaced by Jasper Future, who’d previously played in The Art Goblins. It wasn’t the only change. Unlike his previous off-the-cuff approach to coming up with songs, Argos attempted to sit down and actually write, which he found a comparatively complex method. Thus, he arrived at the title It’s a Bit Complicated.

For an album cover, Argos repeatedly asked that it resemble the front cover of a school textbook, which seemed to vex the designers. After weeks of them failing to grasp the request, the singer just said, “Fuck it,” and signed off on the drawing of a maths set.

Lead single “Direct Hit” was aired to America when the band got to perform it on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. And like the elevation in attention they received from Pitchfork a couple of years earlier, they were delivered to a new audience when the song was included on FIFA 08.

Once more, others were more excited than Argos, who knew little of computer games. But its reach dawned on Argos, he says, when famed disc jockey Chris Moyles sang “Direct Hit” on air, urging listeners to reveal what the hell this tune from FIFA 08 was.

Art Brut retained a schedule of releasing an album every two years with Art Brut vs. Satan (2009) and Brilliant! Tragic! (2011) – both produced by Frank Black – before a seven-year hiatus, including some more line-up changes, was broken by Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!, its title a call back to Bang Bang Rock & Roll, squaring the circle, with Argos sounding like that same kid engaging with his small world with wide-eyed sincerity, not a man about to celebrate his 40th birthday.

Now, this new box set offers a complete retrospective of those crucial formative years, so nothing becomes lost in time.

“It’s nice to feel proud, isn’t it?” says Argos. “And be like, ‘Ah, I made all of these songs.’ It’s quite nice to have it in a physical thing. I’ve always liked CDs and I thought it was funny to be offered to make a CD box set. I’m like, ‘Yeah, 2024? Yeah, right, I’m in.’”

— Dean Van Nguyen