Steve Tulipana and Josh Newton are back with a new music project: Sie Lieben Maschinen

Sie Lieben Maschinen released its debut album, June Gloom, on New Year’s Day. There was no party, no gig, no fanfare — barely an announcement on social media. This wasn’t part of any conscious, anti-marketing formula. The album was ready, frontman Steve Tulipana tells me, a shrug in his voice. Up it went, on with his day.

Josh Newton, guitarist and synth operator, says there wasn’t a band then anyway. “It was just me and machines for a while — me, my computer, a drum machine and my guitar,” he explains. (In German, “sie lieben maschinen” translates to “she loves machines.”) Over the year prior to returning to Kansas City after a decade in Brooklyn, Newton had built clamorous tracks on his computer, recording all the instruments himself, regularly sending the results to Tulipana for lyrics and vocals. It wasn’t until three or four months after June Gloom came out that Sie Lieben Maschinen had its first rehearsal. Jason Gerken (also in Shiner and formerly of Season to Risk) joined on drums, Various Blonde’s Josh Allen on bass.

At first, Newton thought these tracks would be for Season to Risk, the band in which he and Tulipana spent the 1990s, off and on. But as the two continued working together, the music changed direction.

“He was sending me this stuff and he was like, ‘Do whatever you want to do,'” Tulipana says. “And I’m like, ‘Really?!’ I hadn’t done heavy music in a while, and I figured if I was going to do it, it needed to be pretty weird. I wanted to do some really weird stuff with my voice, and I sent it back to him thinking, ‘Oh, he’s going to hate this so much.'”

“There were some moments when I felt like he was seeing how far he could go before I’d say, ‘All right, man, come on,'” Newton adds, laughing. “But I was just like, ‘Cool. Let me send you some more.'”

Weird works for Tulipana. On June Gloom, his bright tenor is an elastic band stretching to hold the music’s post-apocalyptic guitar screeches and tantrum-throwing drumbeats. He snarls and wails through lyrics that are both unsettling (“The Man Laughs,” “Clever Work”) and filled with dark humor (“Premier Cru,” “Should’ve Looked in the Mirror”). The album’s 26 minutes pass by in one abrasive, vaguely uncomfortable blur, an ideal soundtrack for a torture chamber.

Tulipana and Newton share an interest in oddball tones and themes — both cite the unabashedly bizarre 2012 film Holy Motors as primary inspiration for their album — but Sie Lieben Maschinen is not too far out to enjoy. Punk hooks and other landmarks are embedded throughout to keep you from falling off the music’s jagged edges.

“Sie Lieben Maschinen, for me, is really the first time I’m playing music that’s exactly what I want it to be with really no limitations,” Newton says. “We can and do whatever we want, and we’re just as comfortable doing weird dance punk as we are burly noise rock. I guess either way you look at it, you put Steve and I together, you’re going to get noise.”

The two share a laugh. Sitting across from each other in a booth at MiniBar — which Tulipana co-owns and runs, along with RecordBar — these bandmates might be taken for brothers. Now in their 40s, Tulipana and Newton have been friends for more than 20 years — since Season to Risk shared a label with Newton’s former band, Glazed Baby, in the 1990s. Sie Lieben Maschinen is more for themselves, for each other, than it is for the casual listener.

“There’s so much nonverbal communication, where we just pretty much know what the other one is going to do to a point,” Newton says. “I know how to work with him, and I think he knows how to work with me, and it’s easy. The same goes for the other guys — when Jason plays the drums, we know what he’s going to do. The main thing is that, being the silent dictator, I haven’t had to steer anyone in a direction that I wanted it to go. It’s just happened.”

“When he calls himself the ‘silent dictator,’ he means it,” Tulipana says. “In our previous bands, it was always a group effort — we’d come together and jam and come up with songs. Now it’s like, ‘Here’s the song! Now you guys can put the icing on it.’ Which is a really productive way for us to work.”

He pauses. Despite the ease of this band, he admits that finding the time to work is relatively scarce — he’s got the clubs, after all, and both Newton and Gerken are frequently out of town for their own jobs. So there has been a scant handful of Sie Lieben Maschinen so far. (Thursday’s gig will feature three new, rotating fill-in members: Richie Toomer on bass; Auggie Wolber on guitar; and Nick Organ, Gerken’s younger brother, formerly of Sundiver, on drums.) But Newton says there are seedlings of songs for the next album, and both men say they sense their project’s staying power.

“It helps that we spent months and months sleeping on floors and in bands together in the ’90s,” Tulipana says. “You do that, and it doesn’t matter who it is. You either learn to really hate the person or you really connect with them, and you’re lifelong friends at that point.”