On the homestretch Saturday of SXSW this year, So Many Dynamos efficiently set up their equipment in front of a graffiti-painted garage behind a thrift store, inside which trendy college students and elderly ladies with their grandkids browsed. There was a makeshift, blue-tarp awning shading the hot, cracked concrete for the attendees who crossed the river to the south side of Austin, for those of us who wanted—or needed—to get out of the chaos of 6th Street. So Many Dynamos were the draw for many of the people there, including a few industry figures that showed up to scout or simply check out the band. They didn’t go on ‘til close to 6pm, an hour and a half past when they were originally scheduled, but no one seemed to mind; such was the laissez faire attitude of the gathering. Despite the increasing buzz of So Many Dynamos, they’re used to playing these sorts of ramshackle gigs, and thrive on the intimacy and uniqueness of homebrewed settings.

Under a blazing hot Texas sun, So Many Dynamos began to play. As the sweat began to pool and people rose from their cross-legged positions against the backside of the building to stand and move closer, the energy emanating from the t-shirt clad foursome became more and more palpable. Blasting forth from the speakers was a dynamic jumble of sound that blew everyone’s socks off, with its shards of math rock, vigor of punk rock, hook of dance rock—a noisy, angular sound akin to that of Q and Not U or the Dismemberment Plan. But essentially the music of So Many Dynamos is genre-defying. Guitarist Ryan Wasoba declares, “I think the idea is just to be weird pop music,” and that seems to be the most apt description of what these guys are doing.

So Many Dynamos are a St. Louis-based quartet comprised of Wasoba, Aaron Stovall on keyboards and vocals, Griffin Kay on guitar, and Clayton “Norm” Kunstel on drums. They are four friends who were ultimately drawn together by their love of Blue Album-era Weezer back in the day. “When we started, Norm and I were actually in marching band together—we were both in drumline. We recorded with Aaron’s band a lot, and then we went to college and those bands broke up and basically the people who really still wanted to play music from those bands got together and became So Many Dynamos. And Griffin came in later… we actually met him in 2001. He was wearing a Modest Mouse shirt at a Weezer show and we started talking.”

I think it’s fair to say that St. Louis isn’t a town necessarily known for its music scene, so it may either be a refreshing environment in which to cultivate a band’s identity, or a frustrating place to find a foothold on both a local and national level. And in fact, So Many Dynamos aren’t from St. Louis—they’re from Edwardsville, which is about 40 minutes outside the city. Wasoba reflects on the community and elaborates a bit on the music scene there, explaining, “There are some really good bands out here. Since the beginning of time in St. Louis, there’s always been venue crisis or venue drama. There have always been good bands, it’s just been hard to focus in a way for people to really go to shows because every time you start going to one venue it ends up closing down. That’s the way it’s always been. Right now there’s a really great venue that just opened up called the Bluebird. We always try to do all-ages shows, if we can help it—it’s 18 and up there, which isn’t too bad.

“I think the cool thing about St Louis is there have never been any really successful bands to come out of here… so there are not a lot of bands aping that sound. The most successful band that has come out of St. Louis was this really bad screamo band called Story of the Year. But there are people doing that everywhere, so it didn’t feel like a local thing. It’s cool because the bands here are just weird. I think we’ll stay in the area; we’ve invested so much of our personal lives in this region. That was the St. Louis scene for a while—everyone moving out to LA to make it and everyone’s back in their parents’ basements now.”

So Many Dynamos is a fitting name for a band with such an explosive sound, and is, of course, a famous example of clever word-play. Wasoba explains the moniker, saying “The bands we were in before were not cool. Norm and I were in a ska band and Aaron was in a band that sounded like Nerf Herder. So it was really important for us for people to think we were smart. So we wanted a name that was a palindrome, so we were looking up palindrome names on the internet and landed on So Many Dynamos. I mean, we were 18 at the time.”

So Many Dynamos craft their unique sound through the use of a carefully selected assortment of equipment, both in the studio and on tour. Because much of it is vintage, it can be very difficult to find and replace. “One thing we’ve had a lot of problems with, with things that aren’t even super specific, is that they aren’t in mass production right now. Those old analog synthesizers? The new ones just don’t sound the same. Griffin and I use these old ‘80s-style tube amps, which they don’t mass produce at all anymore. If you’re playing 150 shows to 200 shows in a year, it’s a lot of wear on an instrument that isn’t prepared for that. We’re not vintage fetishists or anything, but there are some things they just don’t make anymore. We’ve definitely done tours before where we’ve showed up and I’ve had to be like, ‘Oh, can I borrow a guitar amp?’ at every show.”

The four guys in the Dynamos live together, so practice or rehearsal time is not an issue. They simply work around their work schedules to make time for the band, and the songwriting is a collaborative effort. “I don’t think anyone has ever come in with a complete song written. Unless everyone is completely sold on every part of the song, there is going to be baggage. And that makes it hard, because a lot of songs we don’t play because of that baggage,” muses Wasoba. “We’re not good at jamming. So it’s very rare that we have our instruments in the room and create something from scratch. Someone usually comes in with an idea and we work on it altogether.”