Dept. of Energy

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The night began as an ordinary bullshit session. After a late night of practice, the four 20-somethings who make up the Kinetiks lounged around on the porch sipping wine, smoking cigarettes and delving into deep topics such as marriage, kids and underwear. They got drunker and more chatty, and even though bassist Nate Craft nodded off early, they declared it their first official band sleepover.

“I hadn’t been to a sleepover since middle school,” lead singer Spencer Goertz-Giffen says.

A little over two years old, the Kinetiks, one of Lawrence’s best-kept secrets, create pulsing, catchy pop music. The band’s two female singers (Goertz-Giffen and Rani Waugh) weave well-balanced harmonies and provocative lyrics into what the band labels “dance rock.”

“Basically, we ask ourselves what we like to hear when we’re in an audience,” drummer Jason Kniep says. “We’ve all been to tons of concerts where the bands had too many slow songs or nothing that really made us want to get up and dance. We want to dance, and we want people dancing at our shows.”

“We make music in vivid color,” says Waugh, who also plays keyboards. “So we like to see people enjoying themselves out there.”

The Kinetiks rehearse in a converted garage in East Lawrence. Hanging from the ceiling are an assortment of odd souvenirs, such as a tennis ball and a pair of underwear someone tossed onstage once, which now dangles by a Slinky. Pasted on the walls are posters and band fliers for the likes of Ghosty, Ad Astra Per Aspera and Broken Social Scene, complemented by various curtains, doodles and no-trespassing signs.

The décor represents the Kinetiks’ aesthetic as well as the band’s musical influences. “B.B. King, the Beatles, Boston — we’re pretty eclectic,” Kniep says.

So far, that approach been a plus. The band just put out its first compilation, a self-titled EP that shows the Kinetiks’ penchant for danceable sounds and diverse influences. The disc includes, for example, “Cigarettes on Pluto,” a grooving rock ballad that the group composed late one night while drinking vodka and, desperate for inspiration, paging through Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The result is playful and edgy, kind of like the band itself. The universe is expanding/And you’re so demanding, Goertz-Giffen sings.

Maybe it’s time for another band sleepover.