To paraphrase Paul Simon: If you took all the mosh pits you played to in tiny rock clubs and brought them all together for one night ...

Title Fight is a band that's finding out just how that would feel.

"We started when we were 12 years old," says Title Fight bassist Ned Russin. "It was Jamie Rhoden, my brother Ben and myself. Jamie played guitar and sang, I played bass and sang, and Ben played drums. We wanted to sound like Blink-182. We practiced in my basement, recorded a demo and we just kept playing shows, and in 2005 we added our friend Shane Moran, who started playing second guitar with us. We did a couple more demos, did some EPs, toured a little bit and now we're on Side One Dummy Records, we're sitting backstage in an arena, and we're going to open for Rise Against tonight. That's the brief history."

Russin runs through Title Fight's history in one breath, with a little laugh, as if even he can't believe his good fortune and how crazy it is that they've ended up where they have. Title Fight, modestly put, is just a punk band. Since those heady days of emulating Blink-182, Title Fight have clearly honed their sound and begun veering more in the direction of early hardcore. Recently, they released their debut LP, Shed, which clocks in at 12 songs in under a half hour. It's dirty and blissfully brief. Listening to their album is like shooting a hole in the side of a mid-air plane and watching every stick of furniture jettison out into the vacuum - it's quick, violent, and stupefyingly efficient.

"We know who we are, and we write music that we want to write," says Russin. "That's all that really matters to us. If people like that, that's great, but if people don't like that, we just can't do anything about it. We do what we want to do, and the fact that people like us and that we've had these amazing opportunities is really awesome, and we're very thankful, but at the same time, it's just us playing music."

Speaking of people liking Title Fight, how about that arena?

"It's very weird," says Russin. "This is our first tour of this size. We've done festivals in Europe and stuff - we weren't playing to thousands of people, but other bands were. We played to a couple hundred people, and that was cool. But this is definitely the most people we've ever played to, and it's crazy. The biggest difference is definitely the separation between band and people. We're used to people being able to get up onstage and knock our mic over or pull our cables out. ... Now, we actually have to play well, because people can actually hear us. [Laughs.] ... Not being able to connect with the people in the audience is definitely a hard thing to deal with."

Title Fight has been jettisoned into the colossal mass of mid-air. If the band wants to fill that void, they'll have to get pretty damn noisy, but it looks to me like they have a pretty good start at that.

SHOWARE CENTER, RISE AGAINST, A DAY TO REMEMBER, TITLE FIGHT, THURSDAY, APRIL 19, 7 P.M., $35, 625 W. JAMES ST., KENT, AEGLIVE.COM