The band’s lead singer Mr Joseph Mount picks the 10 tracks that he’s taking on holiday this summer.

The singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and driving force behind indie-electronica-pop combo Metronomy, Mr Joseph Mount, is calling MR PORTER from Paris, where he’s lived for the past couple of years, learning how to appreciate beef tartare, and occasionally bumping into fellow expat Mr Jarvis Cocker. “We haunt the same record stores.” Mr Mount, originally from Totnes in Devon, relocated to be near his French girlfriend; the couple have two young children. “She’s involved in the fashion industry, and is really busy, so I’m taking a break from touring to pitch in with childcare,” he says. “It’s funny, the twists and turns life takes.”

Metronomy fans might well make the same assessment of the band’s diverse output. They began life as a largely instrumental electronic band before veering into 1970s West Coast-style sophistication, albeit given a rackety British spin, on 2011’s Mercury-nominated The English Riviera. Three years later, Love Letters blended wayward psychedelia and Motown-referencing electro-funk. Now, Metronomy are back with Summer 08, which Mr Mount describes as “an attempt to recapture the naivety of when we were just starting out, and everything was new and had a slightly manic edge; it’s 10 tracks, straight up, upbeat. Write another banger, then another, and don’t really think about it.”

Mr Mount took a similar approach when compiling his MR PORTER playlist. “It definitely chimes with the new record, in that it’s feelgood stuff, with the occasional elegiac undertow,” he laughs. “These are definitely ‘up’ tracks, but which have an added element – great production, yearning melody, leftfield weirdness – that’s made them stick around in my consciousness.”

Around the late 1990s, these cooler friends of mine were getting into Cornelius, who’s a Japanese producer and multi-instrumentalist. And I was really into Beck’s Midnite Vultures album, that this track is taken from; I thought it was the most modern thing I’d ever heard. This was originally a kind of skittery funk thing, but Cornelius turned it into a woozy space-ballad, a different song entirely. I’ve done a few remixes myself, and this track inspired me in my approach to reimagine each track from the ground up.

Totnes, for those who don’t know it, has a definite hippie-vibe; I guess I was trying to break out by getting into cool hip-hop labels such as Mo’ Wax. Latyrx was a collective that included DJ Shadow, whose Endtroducing….. album I loved, and this is quite old-school; it’s got elements of Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” going on, but it’s much gentler – an RnB ballad? – and just a great track on its own merits.

I moved to Brighton when I was 18, and started going to this club night that would feature DJs from Warp records playing slightly bizarre stuff. This was one of their regular tracks – an arresting piece, really rough-hewn and Gil Scott Heron-esque. You can’t tell if it’s old or new, and I’m really surprised that it wasn’t more popular at the time. I didn’t throw any crazy shapes to it at the club – I’ve never really been a dancer, though I feel like I might be getting less inhibited with age.

I just came across this a few days ago. It’s three Yemeni sisters who combine traditional Arabic folk singing with an electro backing. Musically it really works, but I love the video to this; seeing young girls from their background making self-aware electro music, while dancing joyfully with some local B-boys as auntie claps away in the corner, is so refreshing, just the kind of thing we need in the current climate.

They’re a kind of postmodern RnB act who’ve taken that 1990s female group sound of SWV and TLC and Destiny’s Child and coated it in a ridiculously funky, dreamy production. It’s indebted to the past but also leagues ahead. This track is a tribute to Muhammed Ali but it’s not at all bombastic; it’s incredibly tasteful, and I mean that as a compliment.

So this is Syd Tha Kyd, who was part of the Odd Future collective, and hearing this blew me away, because I had no idea that she had such an incredible voice. To me, this is as exciting as anything Frank Ocean’s done, but for some reason no one’s as hyped-up about it. It’s also got some of that lovely, airy quality you hear in early Neptunes tracks, which were a massive influence on me. In fact, some of the early things I did could have led to Pharrell suing me for plagiarism. The Neptunes taught me that it was OK to leave things out and let things breathe, and this track does that to perfection.

This originally soundtracked a Levi’s ad in 1999 that starred a yellow puppet called Flat Eric. But it was the radical, minimal techno that knocked me out. I was 15 or 16, and I had no idea where that kind of music could have come from or how anyone could have produced it. We’ve just made a video with Mr Oizo in LA – his real name’s Quentin Dupieux – and I put it on in the car on the way back from the shoot and it sounded brand new and fresh all over again.

This is the kind of track I might once have dismissed as mere chart music, but I remember seeing them on Top of the Pops and being intrigued; they were this trio who were gender-unspecific – is that the correct term? – and the trippy visuals and hook-driven momentum of the song were suddenly undercut by a rappy, talky breakdown about two-thirds of the way through. I rediscovered this recently, and it sounds like nothing so much as a great lost Daft Punk track from the Discovery era.

It’s a bit of a rare groove kind of song that I’ve been playing a lot recently. Having just been in California, I’ve come to understand the allure it had for a lot of musicians, and why it’s got such a chequered rock history. But this song isn’t really about that – it’s just a hymn to how good California is. It could be a tourist board-sponsored song. And I’m in complete sympathy with its sentiments.

This has been going round in my head for the past two weeks solid. It’s a fantastic pop song – to me, it conjures up the feeling of a teenage summer. I think Skrillex [the track’s producer] has absorbed all the sounds of the 1990s – even though he was only born in, like, 1988 – and turned them into something really modern. At the same time, there’s a timeless pop quality to it. To me, it’s up there with “All That She Wants” by Ace of Base. There can be no higher praise, as far as I’m concerned.

Head over to Spotify to hear the whole playlist