Sad but true: You can't manufacture creative chemistry.

Out of all the unpleasant truths that pop musicians have to deal with, this might be the biggest and most unpleasant. There will always be ways to improve musical relationships, or feng sui egos back into harmony, but you can't create someone who will finish your riffs or find that perfect chorus for your verses. You have to find him. Or her. It's why musicians spend hours taping up flyers and checking out Myspace pages every week. It's why most bands are always on the lookout for a drummer.

As is often the case, the best matches tend to fall into your lap when you're not looking. And in Thunderheist's case, Graham Bertie wasn't even sure that he wanted his perfect match at all. In fact, when a friend nudged the Montreal-based produced and DJ toward the Myspace page of a Toronto based vocalist named Isis, his first reaction was: "whatever."

"It was very rappy rap," he explains. Nearly three years have passed since Graham and Isis, now known as Thunderheist, became Myspace friends. They've since toured the world, recorded a debut album for Big Dada, the same label that released Spank Rock's seminal YoYoYoYoYoYo, and find themselves positioned to compete for some serious mainstream success; one of their first singles, "Jerk It," is featured in the surprise Oscar contender The Wrestler, and the next few months are booked up solid, with a pile of SXSW dates followed by a second world tour. Plus, to hear people at Big Dada talk about it, their self-titled debut is going to be pushed, and it's going to be pushed hard.

But back in 2006, Graham and Isis were far from an intuitive fit. Bertie remembers how "a couple of years ago, there was this thing of seeing electronic music as kinda ridiculous," and he had plenty of other irons in the fire, working as a DJ and producing everything from instrumental hip hop to more abstract, quasi-IDM under a variety of aliases. The idea of doing an electro/disco/hip-hop collaboration wasn't exactly on his mind. "Plus, coming at it from a Canadian angle," Bertie smirks, "people hate on Canadian rap all the time, so there was that." But for some reason - whether it was boredom, curiosity, or just a Canadian's genetic predisposition toward politeness we may never know - "I ended up remixing some bootlegs she'd done, and they wound up being the best hip hop tracks I'd ever worked on."

Whatever it was, one thing was clear, even after the pixie dust of serendipity wore off: Graham and Isis had each hit the jackpot. In Isis, Graham had stumbled on his polar opposite, the bright-eyed, smoldering frontwoman to Graham's laidback DJ, a woman with the will to get any crowd's attention and the talent to hold it, undivided. And in Graham, Isis had finally found someone versatile enough to deliver her talent to a bigger audience.

Online relationships sometime fizzle in RL, but this one didn't. When the two finally met face to face during the Montreal Jazz Festival, "I went to this club show that she did, and it wasn't really promoted at all; I got there and there were 10, maybe 20 people inside...[outside before the show] we shook hands, and she wouldn't let go of my hand! She was staring at me, like trying to size me up, and we go inside, and she just KILLS it in front of that few people, totally on fire!" As Graham would soon find out, Isis kills it every night, and having her at the front of the stage helped Thunderheist build up a name for themselves as they toured Canada and Europe.

Born entertainers like Isis are one in a million, but it's only when you turn their debut on that she really begins to stand out. As Graham found out, Isis can do more than rappy-rap. Her flow is flexible, bending from something cool and seductive (the Neptunes-caliber "Red Whine") to an energetic sing-song (the bumping lead track, "Sweet 16") with no problem, but she also does something very few people do anymore: sing with soul. On "Nothing 2 Step 2," Isis delivers a hook that'll stick in the heads of Beyonce fans and blog-house addicts alike. No autotuning, no vocoding. Just a little multi-tracking and some conviction, the latter being something that's in brutally short supply these days.

And for a producer like Graham, having access to that kind of flexibility isn't just valuable, it's essential. He's been DJing for 15 years, and he's collected a lot of influences over the years. Maybe too many. In fact, when he's asked about the sounds that went into his debut, Graham goes blank. "Man, for the amount of times I've been asked this question, I should have some answers. It's messed up." When pressed, though, he offers up an impressively wide range: "Disco...Timbaland...New York post-punk...hyphy...French house...2 Live Crew..Italo...Neptunes...Baltimore club." And on the road, the list grows bigger still. Graham has taken to blending Isis's vocals with electro-house hits like Proxy's "The Raven," and for their upcoming stretch of tour dates, fans should expect lots of surprises. "I'm hoping to have a different configuration to take on the road this year," Graham says.

But as good as Thunderheist are in person, and as good as Thunderheist sounds, as playful and affectionate as Graham and Isis are toward one another in interviews, those big questions remain: What is it about those two? What makes it work so well? Why do they get along?

When I ask him that final, extra-large question, Graham pauses, and considers his response."That," "he smiles knowingly, "is a question for the ages."

Thunderheist's self-titled debut album goes on sale in America on March 31. After a pair of shows in Japan, they will be performing at the iheartcomix SXSW showcase in Austin, TX.