Their debut album has been out for almost two years and somehow the outside world is only just getting to know them as that band that has that backward music video on YouTube. However you know them, Mute Math (or TBTHTBMVOYT, for... short?) is hitting up Sonar in Baltimore tonight for an evening of art rock/post rock/electro rock/whatever the hell music snobs and critics want to label it as.

The band has come a long way from its roots in New Orleans as a duo consisting of keyboardist Paul Meany and producer/percussionist Darren King. And, somehow, even after Meany adopted the keytar, their popularity continued to expand. Swirl in two more eclectic bandmates, on-stage acrobatics, “Stomp!”-like choreography and one infamous video in reverse, and Mute Math has helped reinvent the wheel on what a modern rock band should be. Oh, and they got to recreate the “Transformers” theme for that kinda/sorta big movie that came out this past summer. Not the musical highlight of their repertoire, but still cool.

Lead singer/keytarist God (hey, there’s not a lot of competition out there) Paul Meany took a few minutes to talk about his unique instrument choice, “American Idol,” and what Hell has in store for him.

I saw the “Typical” performance on Jimmy Kimmel. All I can say is, “Holy crap.” Obviously, the setup was a similar to the actually video for the song, but still, how did you actually orchestrate that for a live performance on a late night show?

It took a little doing, I’m not gonna lie. On a TV show, it’s a one take, one shot, hold on to your nuts and hope it all goes right. It took a lot of preparation to get to that. Someone at Warner Bros. got all excited at the idea of trying to do what we did on the video. It took about a month of phone calls talking to their production people on how to pull it off in that environment. The good thing for the band is we’d gone through it once before. We at least kind of knew what we were in for.

You guys pull a lot of acrobatic stunts on stage. How soon is it before one of you breaks an arm or cracks your skull? Or has that already happened?

Bruised and battered, cuts and scratches, but nothing detrimental. One thing that’s interesting — when we did Kimmel, the mentality is once you say action no one yells cut for any reason. I don’t care if the ceiling falls down on us or if someone gets decapitated in the middle of the video, no one stops moving. Our bass player, right at the beginning of filming, he lost his glasses. Their was confetti and shit blowing through the air. Much to his credit he was able to feel his way around and make it through the stunts.

On your "Live at the El Rey" disc, half the songs are well-extended versions of what appear on the LP (like “Noticed,” “Control” and “Break the Same”). How much extra work is it before a tour for you guys to take a song you’ve already written and completed start to finish and then say “OK, how can we make this longer and better?”

It’s just finding a way when we set up our instruments. What moves us? What compels us? It’s not usually just playing it the way it is on the record, but sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s like something else needs to happen, and we just start experimenting. A song evolves from show to show sometimes. We’ve been touring for three years. There’s always ideas that pop up, and it becomes an improvement. It’s great for the audience, too.

What made you think to yourself one day, “You know what, I’m gonna use a keytar. And people will like it”? And then you ended up being right.

The first thing was necessity. I was a keyboard player and we started as a two piece. We tried to make the most of both of those instruments. Early Mute Math days were a little more electronic driven. The keytar was a practical solution. It was a bit strange at first. I know the keytar has a bad stigma, and I don’t know how that happened. Devo and Kraftwerk used it, and I don’t know who screwed it up after that. Luckily, we didn’t get things thrown at us, although one of our first gigs as Mute Math, we opened for Chevelle and a lot of people in audience were dressed in black, well liquored up and ready to rock ass. We go out and are jumping around in pink shirts and ties and a keytar. That was being thrown to the wolves and we survived. Of course, we got some heckling and some discouraging hand gestures, but we made it through. If we can make it through that type of show and live to tell the story, we might be onto something.

A lot of the lyrics in your songs seem to stem from trying to understand the world better and to find your place in it such as “Typical,” “Without It,” “Chaos,” “Control” and others. Is this a quarterlife crisis thing going on or have you found your place in the world or still looking?

I’m a mess. I’m not doing too good on that whole ‘place in the world’ thing. When I write lyrics, it’s a subconscious sort of thing. I hear music and I just start singing within a given melody. Some lyrics just pop up. I usually just write by recording myself singing to a given idea and go back and listen to it and it seems like I’m talking about this or that and then I turn it into cohesive thoughts and then you realize what you were writing about whether it was six years ago or yesterday. It’s part of the addiction to writing songs. Looking at albums as a whole, there’s definitely a simple honesty that happens in the lyrics. Trying to overthink the lyrics would be missing the whole point. The key is to not overthink it.

Have you seen the clip of Chris Sligh singing “Typical” on “American Idol”? I’m sure it was flattering to an extent and exciting to have a song performed on “AI”, but what did you think of his actual performance?

I thought it was good. I never thought about using some of those chords. It’s good to know that’s possible (laughs). That’s about it. The thing is everyone on that show sings songs that are popular, so when he pulled out one of our songs, we felt very grateful. Chris is a great guy. We had met him at a show like eight months before. He came to our bass player and said he was going to audition for “American Idol” and if he made it to the finals, he’d sing one of our songs. Now, THAT is a street team.

OK, so pretend you’re in Hell for a minute. What Mute Math song is on repeat for eternity?

“Control.” It’s probably one of the oldest, and one of the ones we’ve played the most. It’s one of the songs i enjoy live more, but listening to it... that’d be the soundtrack to hell for me.

Biggest musical guilty pleasure?

I’d have to go with Vanilla Ice. I gotta be honest with ya. All these bands do reunion tours nowadays. If Vanilla Ice and M.C. Hammer went on tour together, and didn’t do any new stuff, just went back to what they did with the same haircuts, it would be huge. Now’s the time. Who would not go see that?

Mute Math @ Sonar in Baltimore
7 p.m. tonight
$17