"I wanted to make a departure from typical hardcore lyrics, wanted something visual, slightly disturbing," says Blood Brothers co-vocalist Jordan Blillie. "The lyrics, the title, the artwork [bassist Morgan Henderson's striking photos of a television screen showing Mike Nichols' The Graduate] had a theme of sexual anxiety, frustration. It wasn't planned, it just kind of fell together that way."

The Blood Brothers are 19, 19, 18, 21, and 18. For the most part they have been playing together since junior high: singers Blillie and Johnny Whitney, guitarist Cody Votolato, and drummer Mark Gajadhan grew up as friends on the Eastside (Henderson joined two years ago, and is the oldest). "If you play with someone for five years, you get to know them," says Blillie. And one sees, in the truly brotherly familiarity they share, how an outfit so young can play with the kind of precision that calls to mind much older pros like Fugazi. Their 10-song EP This Adultery Is Ripe has the throw-weight of a full-length album: It is very surprising to find the CD play time displayed at just over 21 minutes.

Accomplished beyond their years, the Brothers' fast but elegant punch rises above the fuzz of most hardcore into an edgier intensity that is both loud and clear. What is most striking about these kids is just how young they are, in a cultural sense. When asked to name their significant musical ancestor, they bring up the early-'90s Bay Area band Jawbreaker. The group's youngest member, Votolato, is just out of high school, and responsible for the Blood Brothers' surging, bitterly exultant guitar sound. When I make the comparison that would come to the mind of most any aging punk, he says, "I've never heard of Wire before."

Before their recent breakneck tour opening for the bands Orchid and Red Scare (33 cities in five weeks), there were bad omens: A close friend of the band had a seizure just before they were to go onstage at the U-District's Paradox Theater, and the gig was canceled. For the first show of the tour, the Brothers drove toward Portland, but when their van broke down in Kelso, Washington, says Whitney, "there were these methed-out people riding around on bikes and we had to get towed back to Seattle. I thought we were going to die on tour."

Once on the road, they drove from Houston to Tucson in a straight shot, without A/C. "We broke down in Dallas and spent six hours by the highway. It was 106 degrees." Cody's cousin, who he hadn't seen since he was little, came and picked them up, took them to dinner, and fixed the van. "An angel," says Whitney. Blillie adds, "In D.C. we played in a dance studio, so all these punks were running around in their socks."

The voices of the Blood Brothers scream straight out of the sexual helplessness of male adolescence, and paint their hallucinations of simultaneous horror and desire in lurid imagery; they know that young men are nature's drones, what John Updike called "the disposable rocket." Sex-seeking obsessives, they kill one another, get sent home from wars in bags by the dozen. The Blood Brothers stand clear-eyed in the middle of this and yell at the top of their lungs. What they don't go for is easy misogyny, instead raging at something like a god that makes such puppets of our bodies: "Have you seen the man with the golden crotch? Who oiled the souls of this town of teenage girls?"

For a band that is so loud, their quieter heroes, people like Nick Cave, Will Oldham, and Joel R. L. Phelps, seem to share only their skill and seriousness, which are what set them apart. Plus, says Whitney, the Brothers have mellowed with age, their early hardcore fundamentalism tempered. "I don't listen to anything punk much anymore. I'm kind of going back to like, Queen--stuff I listened to when I was a little kid."