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At best the reaction Hadouken received upon their arrival in 2007 was mixed.

Five university students who met in Leeds, they harnessed young music fans' thirst for hedonistic, day-glo pop in the trail of Klaxons' new rave explosion.

Critics sneered saying they were immature bandwagon jumpers of the most cynical kind. But their fans voted with their wallets and their debut album sold over 100,000 copies.

Still now, with new album For The Masses in tow, as far as praise in print goes, not much has changed.

"It's still the same no doubt about it. We're never going to be a journalist's darling band but we're going to be a band that a lot of people like," asserts lead singer James Smith, the morning after their first gig of the year.

"If you look at it, a lot of the biggest bands in the world never get critical acclaim. You very rarely get both.

"We'd rather be a band that can sell out shows across the country than a band that gets a couple of journalists' gold star."

Prodigy's influence

In many respects last year belonged to Prodigy, emphatic festival performances at Big Weekend, Download and Reading supplemented with one of 2009's top 20 selling albums.

Hadouken's own situation bears more than a passing resemblance to the band they call "the godfathers of dance" - their debut was called Music For An Accelerated Culture.

Despite the sales of their debut they found themselves out of a record deal.

"We're trying to compete with the best now. We've always been quite a punky band in the early days, now we want to be for real. We're taking our music as seriously as possible," he says.

"We look up and aspire to be like bands like Prodigy and Pendulum. They're the two which really strike out live as who we'd really like to be like."

'Grown up'

They've certainly taken a leap towards that with For The Masses - recorded in Holland with drum 'n' bass pairing Noisia.

"We've grown up a little bit. It's not been such a rollercoaster. We've had a little bit of time to sit back and decide what we want to do live and what sort of band we want to be."

The band they want to be certainly isn't the same scissor-kicking hi-top wearing group they were. They've - whisper it - matured. Take a look at their new monochrome picture profiles on the fivesome's MySpace.

"We want to take it in a new direction and not be about social observation - the comedy and the irony. It was just the new direction we needed to take or we'd be covering old ground," says Smith.

"It's [the title] more about performing our music to a large group of people. This is music designed to be played to a festival crowd or in a big arena.

"We want to step our game up in that sense. The songs - they're bigger and bolder."

Releasing on their own label - they're also very much in charge of their future. One, that as it stands, looks pretty bright.

"It feels good," says Smith defiantly. "We like to be masters of our own destiny in the sense that we don't like someone making decisions for us in an office somewhere."