The first song I ever heard from TV Girl was the title track from their 2011 EP, Benny and the Jetts. I didn't know, at the time, what an appropriate song it was to get introduced to this band. As the story of the song goes, a man is in love with a woman, and one of his most striking memories is her taking off in her car, with an Elton John song playing off into the distance.

This emotional tie to music is a theme that represents itself in most of TV Girl's songs, if not so intimately referenced. Made up of looped samples of '60s soul and bubblegum songs, the music of the Los Angeles-based TV Girl then incorporates hip-hop beats and blissed-out indie pop vocals, creating what amounts to a kind of factory-tested ideal for summer soundtracks. Everything is nostalgic and new with TV Girl, with the result coming out as a neo-futurist ode to the cyclical nature of popular music.

Oh, and it sounds really great.

"I wanted to infuse pop with these hip-hop beats that I was making, and we made that first EP in a week, and it got picked up by a lot of blogs, and that was the beginning of it," says TV Girl's Brad Petering. "I was listening to a lot of hip-hop - I'm a big fan - and I started making my own beats. I was listening to lots of De La Soul and Paul's Boutique and just really getting into sampling - Public Enemy and a lot of the records from the early '90s that had a lot of sampling on them. It was really different, because before that, I had written all my songs on guitar. I was getting bored with that, and reaching a certain point where I wasn't progressing. Sampling is very cool, because it's a whole different way to write songs."

Girls' Christopher Owens once said that he wrote one of his band's songs with the hope that Beyonce would eventually sing it. This was a pure pop song, he said, and the implication was that it should have a real pop star at the helm. TV Girl makes me think of this, with their impeccable pop tunes that are sung by Petering in an understated, doubled-up voice. He makes these songs soar, to be clear, but it also comes across like a bare-bones blueprint for a diva to come by and drag them to the top of the charts.

"These samples use different rhythms and chord progressions than I would normally come up with using a guitar," says Petering. "I've always been a fan of pop music, like girl group stuff ... this really catchy music. One of the problems, listening to that, is that the lyrics are pretty bubblegum-y. They're made for adolescent kids. I like a lot of lyrically mature music like Bob Dylan. I wanted to combine catchy music with smart lyrics. ... I feel like our music has matured, in a way. I write them in the same way - you just pick your loop and build off of that - but you get more experimental with the loops you pick, or more obscure with the samples you're using, or chop them up in ways that aren't as obvious. I think that's definitely true for our latest record."

TV Girl's latest LP, French Exit, finds them playing with their plastic format. As always, there's a constant sensation of feeling like you've heard these songs before, but TV Girl are growing and becoming more than the sum of their generations-spanning parts.

TV GIRL, w/ Brothertiger, Globelamp, 8 p.m., Friday, July 18, Northern, 414 ½ Legion Way, Olympia, $5

TV GIRL, w/ Brothertiger, Coma Figura, Hot Cops, 8 p.m., Saturday, July 19, Bob's Java Jive, 2102 South Tacoma Way, Tacoma, cover tba, 253.475.9843