PET Shop Boys have come up with a Super title for their new studio album, matched by the brilliance of its first single The Pop Kids.

"We started to write this album in London in 2014. The first song we wrote was The Pop Kids," says singer Neil Tennant, now a veteran 61, 35 years into the northern synth-pop duo's career of ironic social observation and dancefloor dazzle.

"That song was actually started on tour with Take That," says Chris Lowe, his partner in electronic elan. " I didn’t know that," says Neil. "It was started in Munich, hence it was originally called 'Munich'," rejoins Chris, who had a little keyboard set-up on the tour.

"After the shows I quite often don’t want a drink or even to go to the hotel bar, so rather than go to the hotel bar for one last drink I would switch the gear on and have a little go at writing some songs, without any thought of what they would be used for. But as I was doing this one [The Pop Kids], I did think it was rather good, so when we started writing for the album in Berlin I dug it up."

The lyrics for The Pop Kids, were inspired by "sort of a true story", reveals Neil. "You may have noticed that the lyrics say, 'Remember those days, the early 90s? We both applied for places at the same university'. Mark Farrow, our designer, thought it was autobiographical. He said, 'You’ve knocked a few years off there!'.

"Actually, it’s about a friend of mine who moved from Birmingham to go to King's College in London to study History and he made friends with a girl there," he says. "They both loved pop music and they used to go clubbing all the time and because of that they were known as the pop kids. I remember him telling me this and at one point I just wrote down the title 'The Pop Kids' because I thought it sounded like a good song title. And when Chris dug out 'Munich', it made me think of 'The Pop Kids' for some reason."

The rest of Super, released last Friday on the X2 label, began to take shape in November 2014. "We have a little studio in Berlin that we use and we go there to write. We also have a studio in London but a lot of the time we worked in Berlin," says Neil. "We started going over there for two or three weeks at a time, and just writing, and over this period, which would be from November 2014 to July 2015, we wrote about 25 songs. So 11 of them are on the album."

Had Pet Shop Boys felt re-energised by Electric, the 2013 album that gave them their highest-charting album in Britain and the United States for 20 years? "I don’t think we ever really feel not energised when we’re writing music," says Neil. "But we did know that we were going to work with Stuart Price again, so we knew the sort of record that we would all enjoy making together," counters Chris.

"So we were sort of aiming towards that goal. And then Neil at one point said 'we want to make it like Electric but more so'. So it was going to be even more electric than Electric. That was the idea."

Price travelled over to the duo's London studio from Los Angeles last July. "We listened through to everything we’d written and made a decision to go with the more electronic/dancey ones, including darker songs, like Sad Robot World," says Neil. "We had ones which were more conventionally 'pop' that we decided not to put on, but maybe might be on the next album.

"We wanted to make an album that had a very strong electronic mood all the way through it. It felt like Electric had been a sort of 'rebooting' of the Pet Shop Boys, reminding ourselves that we came into this whole thing because we liked electronic music. Until this album and the previous album we’ve never been electronic purists; there have always been other instruments and orchestras and things like that. Whereas this album and Electric are purely electronic albums."

Chris came up with the Super album title. "I was walking to the studio one day and I kept imagining Germans saying “super”, because they say ‘super’ in a certain way – 'Super, Ja!' – and they say ‘super’ a lot, and I just thought, 'Oh, super!'. Because we’d been through a few titles, hadn’t we?," he says.

"And 'Super' is an international word. It’s a Latin word in fact," points out Neil. "Also I could always imagine doing a Super Hits Tour," adds Chris.

Given the album title, how would Pet Shop Boys sum up Super? "I think its old Pet Shop Boys mixed with new Pet Shop Boys," suggests Neil. "It’s super, isn’t it," decides Chris.