The Trashies had dealt with a lot of weird shit on their most recent tour, but the weirdest thing to happen to them was in New Orleans: The audience wanted an encore. Such a show of affection was unprecedented and confused the band. They'd been on the road for three weeks, destroying stages across the nation, and this hapless audience wanted them to come back out and fuck shit up some more? They eventually played something, because, as bassist Billy Brownnote reasons, "We had to oblige those poor fools."

Keyboardist/vocalist Jesse Cody remembers the milestone differently. Actually, he barely remembers it at all: "That's bizarre. Did we play an encore, guys?"

Still crammed into a 1990-something Chevy van with no stereo, four hours away from Minneapolis, they refuse to break character for an interview, and it doesn't help that their one cell phone is a piece of crap. Usually the Trashies play all their songs in one blistering 20-minute cluster fuck, so what that encore might've consisted of is a burning question that will, for now, remain unanswered.

"It's hazy," Cody says. "My keyboard was broken by then, so I crawled inside a trash can and screamed from there. I'm using a borrowed keyboard now. It's the sixth—seventh?—it's the seventh keyboard of the tour. I borrowed it from this guy, and I'm supposed to mail it back to him when I get to Seattle. For sure. Good luck."

Clearly the Trashies are feeling the effects of the road. "We've been having physical setbacks," Cody says. "Damage to our bodies, I mean. I cut my foot open and some drunken bandaging ensued. Wolfman, our guitarist, he seems to have suffered testicular damage. He's got purple boils on his nut sac." Following an incident involving prescription pills and a small quantity of marijuana, Wolfman spent a night in a west Texas jail. "The purple boils and the prison thing are completely unrelated," he insists.

Since they came together two years ago, the Trashies have been releasing 7-inches and LPs with astonishing speed. Their dozens of songs all sound pretty, um, trashed: Production values are nonexistent; instruments have been molested beyond repair. But something about this soiled punk rock resists sheer junkiness—somewhere, hidden in the off-tempo melodies and off-key howling about Steven Seagal, there's an unabashed pop sensibility slowly dying of cancer.

The Trashies were recently featured as Band of the Day on Spin's website; the "single" that was chosen for the "honor" was "Let It Be Trashed." The MP3 sounds like the B-52s being shoved sideways through a meat grinder to the tune of drummer Ricky Trash's go-go percussion.

The epic song in the Trashies oeuvre, the "Stairway to Heaven," if you will, is a just-shy-of-two-minutes slab of SoCal synth rock called "Sweatpants Boner." It's the story of someone who tries to behave like an adult—get a job, pay the overdue rent—but his untoward erection keeps getting in the way. It would be stupid to call the song an antiresponsibility anthem, but every other label is even more useless.

But hearing the Trashies on record is nothing compared to the revelatory thrill of seeing them live. The band got their start playing filthy basement shows—on one momentous occasion, Cody bled on half the audience—and those animalistic tendencies haven't faded with time.

It's easy to be a sucker for the shitty antiglamour of the band's shtick, but they can't disguise the real talent that it takes to keep a song running on the ragged edge of garbage. It's post-post-post-whatever-punk—the Trashies are characters putting on a show, but when they're onstage they become what they're pretending to be: gonzo punk-rock Shivas. When they're hate-fucking music, they really do want to destroy the world, one club at a time.

After enduring the punishing road experience that they clearly love, honing both their sound and their "philosophy," the Trashies will play a homecoming show at the Comet this week and an all-ages event at Atlas Clothing a week later that promise to be their Trashiest shows yet. Perhaps they'll play their second career encore. Or perhaps they'll break all their instruments before they get the chance.

When Cody's asked about the next step for the Trashies, it's impossible to distinguish his nihilism from genuine excitement. "We played an outdoor show in New Mexico," he says. "It sounded terrible. We sound really bad outside, so our next album is gonna be called Psychedelic Camouflage. We're going to record in the woods. We'll get the sounds of Mother Nature and all the little animals. It'll be the sound of us conquering nature once and for all." recommended

editor@thestranger.com