Pet Shop Boys

At the Orpheum Theatre. Nov. 9 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $38 and up. 800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com

The British duo Pet Shop Boys, made up of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, are responsible for some of the most indelible pop tracks of the past four decades. Using ideas nicked from dance music to create gleaming pop gems, the pair honed a sound that transcended genre or decade to become defiantly theirs.

The pair, who come to the Orpheum Theatre on Nov. 9, broke through in the mid-’80s with “West End Girls,’’ a bleak slice of synthpop that fused a thudding bass line with smoke-plume keyboards, Tennant’s clipped voice narrating a paranoid night out. It hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 in May 1986, its windswept synths and stubborn Britishness adding some shades of grey to the chaotic pop landscape.

“People talk about the ’80s as being about power dressing and all the rest of it, and there was an element of that,’’ Tennant said. “But the ’80s were very experimental. It was the golden age of songwriting. The songs were very unusual.’’

The singles that followed were similarly exploratory, mixing resplendent production and a deep respect for the pop canon with Tennant and Lowe’s wry yet romantic worldview. The soured-relationship kiss-off “What Have I Done to Deserve This?’’ paired Tennant with blue-eyed soul star Dusty Springfield, while the band’s lush fleshing-out of the country standard “Always on my Mind’’ added gravity to its plainly stated pain.

“Like so many great British acts, Neil Tennant’s trick was to steal from the Americans and sell it back in a different accent,’’ said British pop critic Tom Ewing in an e-mail. “While his UK contemporaries were working out how to inject soul into synthpop, Tennant and his musical partner Chris Lowe borrowed production ideas from the New York loft disco of Bobby ‘O’ and the Hi-NRG sound of gay clubland. Then he added the mordant reflections of a Brit journalist taking an unlikely shot at pop stardom in his early 30s.’’

In April, Pet Shop Boys released “Super,’’ their 13th album, which they recorded with producer Stuart Price. On this record and its predecessor, “Electric,’’ the pair decided to focus squarely on making music with synthesizers, a back-to-basics approach that resulted in the pair producing records that Tennant called “very focused and very powerful-sounding.’’

“In recent years, we’ve been very interested in becoming electronic purists,’’ Tennant said. “Although Pet Shop Boys is a sort of classic synth duo, we’ve never been electronic purists. If you listen to [our] albums in the ’80s and ’90s and since then, there’s normally a lot of other musicians. The last two albums, it’s been us and synthesizers. That’s been quite liberating, I’d say. Also, it’s sort of a discipline — you’ve got to work it out through electronics, not through thinking, ‘Oh, let’s put a 45-piece orchestra on this.’’

While synthesizer-only music might sound like a recipe for chilliness or at least remove, the Pet Shop Boys’ last two albums have plumbed the dancefloor’s depths for emotion. The grandiose “Love Is a Bourgeois Construct,’’ from “Electric,’’ puts on a bravely intellectualized front that hardly hides the longing within; the thudding “The Pop Kids,’’ the first single from “Super,’’ traces sugar-rush feelings that are as enamored with romance as they are with song.

There’s wit as well, though. “Groovy’’ uses whirling synths and a strutting beat to reframe the decades-old term for “cool’’ into an Instagram-era wink at the selfie-obsessed. “It’s simultaneously celebratory and critical,’’ Tennant said. “It’s a sort of anthem for the age of narcissism — that was the idea of the lyric. But at the same time, it’s celebrating it, too.’’

Then there’s “Sad Robot World,’’ a mournful shuffle in which Tennant details a story of bloodless beauty arising from “a mechanical ballet of slow deliberation.’’ The story behind that track comes from a trip the pair took to a car factory.

“We visited the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, and there was this bit at the end where these robots are washing the finished cars,’’ Tennant recalled. “There was something about it that was almost sad. These graceful movements, these long arms from robots, mechanically washing the car, and I said, ‘Wow, it’s like a sad robot world.’ Of course, there’s always a part of my brain thinking, ‘Ooh, that’s a good lyric,’ and so I wrote that down. It ended up on the album was because the subject matter is a very traditional electronic music subject matter — alienation.

“I was amazed no one had written a song called ‘Sad Robot World,’ ’’ Tennant adds. “I looked it up on iTunes, and no one had.’’

Pet Shop Boys

At the Orpheum Theatre. Nov. 9 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $38 and up. 800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com

Maura Johnston can be reached at maura@maura.com.