It is January, and squeezed away upstairs in their favorite sushi restaurant in downtown Sao Paulo are the six members of CSS plus a stray boyfriend. (Turns out he belongs to producer-cum-drummer Adriano Cintra, the only fella in the group.) After 18 months touring the world, they are back home in Brazil to record their second album, which at this moment might end up being called "Donkey" or might end up being called "Hunk of Sh*t." Shortly hereafter, once the album's finished and it's summer festival season in Europe and North America, the band will split this sprawling megalopolis for good. But this evening, as the rain slams down in the subtropical streets outside, the sake is flowing.

Conversation around the low table ranges over Shilpa Shetty (the band met her in the green room of U.K. TV show "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross"); the fanciability of the "Flight of the Conchords" guys (the band are big fans of the New Zealand comedy show); their myriad tattoos ("Adri has the worst!" — and he does, two lovey-dovey stick figures on his arm); and the stinkiness of their road crew. "We've got one roadie with the smelliest shoes ever," says glamorous guitarist Ana Rezende. "One thing about us as a band, because we're women, we keep everything very neat on the tour bus."

I'd last seen CSS in subzero Cambridge, England — almost 10,000 km away — in early December. The band had traveled there by train, didn't soundcheck, and played poker beforehand. "The preparation for the show is really boring," Cintra says later. "But when you get on stage it's crazy — it's the best thing." Cue streamers in the air and a friend dressed as an outsize Christmas present stalking the stage, as sophisticated teenage girls in spangly getups and provincial spotty boys bounce up and down to "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above," "Music is My Hot Hot Sex" and the rest of the band's necessarily limited canon. It's an exhilarating gig and easy to understand how, over the course of a year or so, CSS have become one of the hottest live acts on the circuit and pinups for the music press and social-networking site MySpace.