The Veronicas  Unlike the Veronicas' more guitar-centric and sensitive debut, "The Secret Life Of...," "Hook Me Up" details the travails of a vigorous nightlife regimen, and the first twinges that it all might be an empty show. "Untouched" slips from cloying catcalls into a blown-out emo-disco chorus that would leave acres of lip-ringed boys dumbstruck. Music Box @ Fonda,  6126 Hollywood Blvd.,  Hollywood.  8 tonight   $16. (213) 480-3232.

Isis  Isis has always worked in fine lines, particularly the ones between menace and allure, coyness and urgency. Its new album, "Wavering Radiant," is built on moments when a rib-cracking riff dissolves in a well of reverb, then returns as a pulse-quickening melody or a spectral effect.  Music Box @ Fonda,  6126 Hollywood Blvd.,  Hollywood.  8 p.m. Wed.   $16. (213) 480-3232.

There are few difficult years in pop music to be a staggeringly attractive band of Australian twin sisters who play club-friendly techno-pop about making out with girls in dark corners. But the Veronicas found one in 2008. Their former tourmates the Jonas Brothers had the sibling-band beat on lockdown, and in America at least, pop tarts like Katy Perry and Lady GaGa staked first claims to post-post-feminist dance-floor fillers.

Though top sellers in Australia, Jessica and Lisa Origliasso seemed consigned to the long list of neglected-in-America pop acts abroad after their second album, “Hook Me Up,” was released with zero fanfare in the U.S. last August by Sire Records. But the 24-year-olds have hit an unlikely sweet spot recently with their single “Untouched” -- a lithe bit of ravey shoegaze teenpop (a genre that needed inventing if there ever was one) written with longtime producer Toby Gad and featuring a striking goth-leaning video.

Word of mouth and constant touring have moved nearly a million copies of “Untouched” in the U.S., and it has left the band in an unusual place in America’s pop scene: that of a striving Top 40 act whose newly rougher electro edges have a place in today’s pop mainstream.