When I first heard Red Hex - a single, lonely song called "Run Like Hell" on their MySpace page - I decided to write a show preview simply based on that. I described the song as sounding similar to how I imagined the Sonics must have sounded to the bewildered ears of those who witnessed their shows back in Tacoma, circa 1963: this sounds like rock 'n' roll, totally danceable and complete with a Chuck Barry-esque riff, but god almighty, why is it so loud? And why is the lead singer screaming so much? Is that a hole in the amplifier?

The first time I saw Red Hex, it was at an underground venue on Halloween. One of the members was a filthy mummy, wrapped up in sheets. Their music was an unholy roar, bouncing aggressively off the concrete walls of the club, soaked in clouds of cigarette smoke and spilled Pabst Blue Ribbon. Their sound was growing - gaining power. I relinquished and put toilet paper in my ears.

Recently, at the Peabody Waldorf Gallery, I saw a new side of Red Hex. To be sure, they were as loud as ever (and, as the crowd proved, as conducive to moshing as ever), but their music was broadening. There were glimmers of metal, of pop song-craft, even of something that resembled a power ballad among the punk rock clatter and between-song banter about fighting the man that's keeping you down. The effect was giddy and exciting - and, best of all, it sounded new.

The members of Red Hex have a strange connection to music that began at an early age. Most notably, lead singer Sam Olsen is the nephew of Bon Von Wheelie and Kahuna, of local legends Girl Trouble. Raised in such a musical environment, it's not wholly surprising that Olsen picked up a guitar and formed a band called the Villains when he was just 7 years old. Five years later, he'd be part of the much-missed Freakouts.

This wild and frighteningly ambitious punk rock trajectory is shared among the members. Bassist Spencer Russo was listening to Slayer and playing metal riffs in fifth-grade, while drummer Isaiah Tankiewicz was making "bad noise music, just some home recording stuff" at the age of 10.

Their first year at Tacoma School of the Arts, Tankiewicz and Olsen had a Meet Cute at the pre-semester camp that SOTA holds. They bonded over having, completely separately, discovered and obsessed over the same music.

"I had no friends when I was a kid," says Tankiewicz. "Until about 15, I didn't really have any close friends, and I wasn't from a place where people really knew about music, or anything. So, I found out everything I knew about music by myself. And then, finally, when I met Sam, I was like, ‘What? People know what some of this stuff is?'"

"That's the cool thing about SOTA," says Olsen. "It's not really that great. It just opens you up to (realizing that) there are some people that are into this weird, freak-scene shit, too."

Olsen and Tankiewicz proceeded to jam for the majority of their time at SOTA before officially forming Red Hex in 2009. Soon they were joined by Russo on bass, and Red Hex started to slowly blossom into something more than a straight-forward garage rock band.

"We don't really hold ourselves onto that genre," says Russo. "That's why a lot of our songs don't sound similar at all. If we like it, we're just going to fucking play it."

"What turned me on to exploring new sounds is this band called the Hunches from Portland," says Olsen. "They were a garage punk band to start with, and then they just got into this really dreamed-out, surreal, majestic punk - this really distorted, majestic shit that turned me onto (the notion) that you can use the instrumentation of a garage punk band but do whatever you want with it. Make whatever song you want."

Though the members of Red Hex are still younger than 21, they are very enthusiastic frequenters of local shows. Their main issue with local shows, it seems, is the crowd's disinterest in getting excited about the music. They relate to me a story about a disastrous show they played down in Portland.

"The crowd was full of these hipsters," says Olsen. "They're fake. They're posers. They're not really into music. They're not there for music; they're there to get laid and have social status. It's like a game for them. ... It was the deal where no one could go crazy or think it's cool if someone else that's cooler than them hasn't done it yet."

Soon, we were talking about the state of music in that sort of wonderfully grandiose way that a bunch of young, snobby music lovers can. Garage pop, they say, has reached its apex and must be advanced.

"We're trying to progress garage punk, instead of going back to the '60s, which is what all the other bands seem to be doing," Olsen says. "Garage pop is like the new pop, it's like the new norm. All this stuff that's in Spin magazine - that's not garage punk! Wavves is not garage punk. That's indie bullshit."

"And Jay Reatard is huge, now that he's dead, which makes me so pissed off, man," says Olsen. "I saw him in Portland, and it was awesome. He put on the best show ever, but the only people in the crowd that were moving were me and a couple of kids from Tacoma. It was packed and we were going apeshit. And then they got pissed because we were going too crazy. And then he had to die, so now all of those people are like, ‘Oh, I saw Jay Reatard, man. I was going crazy in there!' No you weren't. You were standing there like little hipster bitches in Portland."

A word to the wise: dance at a Red Hex show. It's all about this weird, freak-scene shit.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The original version of this story included mention of a "filthy mummy wrapped in sheets" described as a member of Red Hex. It has since been brought to Rev. Adam McKinney's attention that the mummy in question was actually a member of Si Si Si.