A tone of indignation seemed to colour N-Dubz’ response when asked about Gary Barlow’s guest spot on their second album. “We’re not narrow-minded,” Fazer explained, “We can make big tunes ... big concepts. That’s why we’ve got Gary Barlow in.” In delivering his answer, it seems that Fazer misunderstood the emphasis of the question. The surprise wasn’t so much that N-Dubz welcomed Barlow’s overtures — more that the man who penned Back For Good and Never Forget might be au fait with this Camden trio’s potty-mouthed urban vignettes.

Music fans who like to equate quality with lyrical gravitas may take one look at N-Dubz and feel that there’s nothing for them here. Indeed, it’s hard to remember the last time a group craved such respect while at the same time inviting utter ridicule. Coupled with his penchant for bobbled headgear, Dappy’s habit of sticking his hand down his trousers would be disconcerting even if the group’s singer standing beside him in the photos wasn’t his cousin Tulisa.

In between the group’s debut album, Uncle B, and this one, Dappy became a father. In spite or because of his subsequent separation from the mother of his baby son, the new album pays host to a pro-contraception parable entitled Shoulda Put Something On. Interviewed in Q recently, he exclaimed that when the song finally emerges, “everyone will go, ‘How did they tink [sic] of that subject? How come they writ [sic] it so well?’ ”

All of which would be fine and funny were it not for the one inconvenient truth that sits at the centre of Against All Odds. Even among their high-achieving peers in the emerging “Brrrap Pack” scene — Tinchy Stryder, Chipmunk, Taio Cruz — it’s hard to think of another emerging act that constructs such blazingly catchy tunes. Co-written by the trio, Stryder’s self-fulfilling hit Number One bore the hallmarks of a formula that N-Dubz deploy to clinical effect, not just on their version of the song (included here) but on several other tracks — including the Barlow-abetted No One Knows — an industrially adhesive paean to the group’s early years of financial struggle. Trying to isolate the hook on the current single, Stay With Me, is a near-thankless task — not because it doesn’t have one, but because over three minutes of lyrical to-ing and fro-ing between Dappy and Tulisa, choruses go off like fireworks.

Whether you think this is enough to mitigate N-Dubz’ default lyrical tone is open to debate. In terms of sentiment, Say It’s Over isn’t terribly different to, say, You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling. But recast in N-Dubz’ vernacular, “You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips” becomes “Soon as I touch base she be all up in my face/ It’s the same old s*** she never gives me any space.” Na Na has the grime forerunner Wiley stopping by with a few ripe observations of his own: “Money money makes the world go round/ Same way money makes the girls go down.”

Not to be outdone, the London rapper Fearless outlines his own street-tough credentials over a poppified swell of Bernard Herrmann-style strings on Duku Man. “Never have seen a man run so fast/ I’m surprised that he never done a poo-poo,” as an immaculately-timed burst of bum-trumpeting emphasises his point.

If you’re laughing with them rather than at them, then, there’s every chance that you fall within the 11-26 demographic that, in Dappy’s words, has “our music on their phones”. You could have foreseen a pop phenomenon like N-Dubz as long as three years ago, when Alex Turner, of Arctic Monkeys, sang that there’s “only music so there’s new ringtones”. It probably didn’t strike him as a good thing, but as attention spans get shorter, the pressure to pile on the hooks gets greater. N-Dubz are a testament to that shift. On the terms they’ve set out for themselves, Against All Odds is an unequivocal success.

(All Around the World/Universal)

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