TORONTO - There's something deceptive about the music of Aqua.

Beneath a veneer so sugary it'll make your teeth hurt, behind the popping dance beats that made their 1997 single Barbie Girl a massive international hit, here is a band that managed to tick off America's best-known toy manufacturer with its supposedly suggestive lyrics.

There's also something deceptive about Aqua in person.

In town yesterday to promote Aquarius -- the follow-up album to their 1997 debut Aquarium -- the Danish group members are so up-front and, well, normal, you'd hardly guess they were pop stars.

Considering they kick off the new disc -- out today -- with a partly self-parodying tune called Cartoon Heroes, they surely aren't taking themselves too seriously.

"Humour has always been a big part of our friendship, and therefore this group," Aqua keyboardist Claus Norreen said yesterday in a downtown hotel, flanked by singers Lene Grawford Nystrom and Rene Dif and keyboardist Soren Rasted.

"We've used it in a way that I think is very Scandinavian. It keeps us from getting too much into being a pop star. To step back, you use irony and humour."

A dark-horse entry in the late-'90s bubblegum explosion, Aqua members admit they worked intentionally on several levels. Rapid-fire dance beats, brightly-coloured videos, chirpy rhymes and comic interplay between Nystrom and Dif appealed to pre-teens, ironically-inclined clubbers, and musos who saw genius in the band's hit-ready formula.

"People couldn't quite decide at first if we were serious or doing it with irony," Nystrom said. "Grown-ups started to get the idea. But we were very surprised that so many kids became fans of ours, because we wrote the songs with irony. Now we see it and it's very understandable, because it's all very cartoonish with lots of colour."

Then again, added Dif, "We don't have a specific message. It's not like we sing about politics. We try to do the opposite to what other pop bands do. We don't sing love ballads. We make fun of ourselves, of the record business. We don't offend anyone."

"Well, we do," Rasted said with a laugh. "They just don't know we're offending them."

Aqua's lighthearted attitude belies the effort that went into Aquarius. Exhausted from touring for their first album, they snuck a few months of rest before locking themselves away in the studio for a year in order to work up the buoyancy needed.

"In our case, it's very healthy to sit in a dark room," Rasted said, laughing. "We'd just left everything from before. When we went back, there was year-old milk and coffee there. We picked up where we left off, except we didn't know what to do."

No doubt aware of the creative constraints their approach could present, Aqua kicked the humour to the next level with Aquarius. Without changing their sound dramatically, they spin their pop jingles into cabaret numbers, country-and-western goofs, Celine-scale ballads, and even a pepped-up salsa number.

"We weren't trying to do (a Latin song) in response to any trends, just our desire to write that kind of song," Dif said. "We played it for a person we know from Brazil who said, 'Hey, that's too fast. That's nothing to do with Salsa!' Well, it was our take on it."

Said Nystrom: "We have one rule in the band: To stay around as long as we have fun with it. The feeling we have right now is the best we've had together."

Aqua make an in-store appearance today at 6 p.m. at Music World in the Bramalea City Centre.