If somebody made a Saturday-morning cartoon series about eight sassy kids who took a time warp back to the 1970s and started a rock band, it would still be nowhere near as animated as The Suburban Sound.

The Suburban Sound look like the Allman Brothers, sing like Skynyrd and rock out with all of the arena theatrics of The Who. They’re ’70s rock incarnate, complete with a rolling horn section and a frontman who could take Mick Jagger on strut for strut in a sass-off.

With members ranging in age from 20 to 25, The Suburban Sound are old enough to understand the whos, whats and whys of rock’s greatest era, but young enough to still sound dangerous, to inject their music with the kind of devil-may-care rebelliousness that made it impossible to take your eyes off of bands like the MC5. As Joe Perry once put it, “You can have the rock, but you need the roll.” And that’s what The Suburban Sound have got going for them: a monstrous amount of roll.

The band’s members, most of whom have been playing together since high school, stumbled upon classic rock in the early 2000s after growing tired of getting lost in the region’s bottomless pit of hardcore and punk bands.

“Through the natural course of looking for something different, we kind of rediscovered what’s already been done 30 years ago,” explains saxophonist Andy Styer.

“You don’t appreciate your parents’ music when you’re, you know, 18,” he laughs. “But we started looking into all these bands, and we were like, ‘Man, this stuff is really good. It rocks hard, but it’s not obnoxious.’ It’s something different. It’s kind of a timeless sound.”

But The Suburban Sound is not a classic rock jukebox. This isn’t just regurgitated chord patterns buzzing through a vintage amp. What the band’s done is mined the music of everyone from Led Zeppelin to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Chicago, stolen what was necessary – the over-the-top arena rock guitars, the fierce horns, the madman vocals – and given it a facelift.

“Those [bands] are definitely our roots, but we’re also trying to do something new,” Styer says. “It’s not 1970 anymore. There’s a lot of other stuff over the past 30 or 40 years that we can pull from. I consider us to be fairly creative people as well. It’s not just some vintage, novelty throwback band like Jet or The Hives.

“Part of our attitude and swagger definitely comes from punk rock, because that’s the kind of music we were into in high school, and we definitely carried that with us.”

As you might guess, an eight-member band wearing girl jeans, butterfly collars and silk scarves can make for quite the spectacle. It’s worth the cover charge just to witness guitarist Scott Rehnberg’s fashion sense in person.

Styer admits that a lot of times people don’t really know what to make of The Suburban Sound, especially in a bar setting. “Hey, that boy’s wearing the shirt I wore to the prom in 1972!”

And the fact that the members all go apeshit onstage doesn’t help either. “It just comes out. [Our singer] is a very dramatic person. He’s an actor. He’s an artist that way,” Styer says. “It’s his stage and his limelight, and he’s going to steal it. He’s going to give people what they paid for.”

A Suburban Sound show is a black and white experience: either you get it or you don’t. Find out if you’re one of the cool kids.