“The interns are gone, but do we want our ears to bleed?” asks Abby Sevcik.

The members of post-punk/electro-pop foursome Mystery Friends are debating the optimal volume level for their amps in rehearsal on a recent weeknight. Assembled after work hours in one of their typical rehearsal spots—a sterile conference room near Logan Circle, lined with snake plants and turquoise glass panels—they’re running through a track still in the making.

“You’re getting to preview our new song for the first time,” bassist Robbie Lee tells me.

The working title is “Woodstock,” which they swear has no connection to the Woodstock 50 festival that didn’t materialize in Maryland earlier this year. Rather, it was named for the Baltimore suburb where they recorded their debut LP, likely making an appearance at their Pie Shop show on Friday.

Though there are several yards of space between each member—Sevcik (vocals, synth), David Mohl (guitar, synth), Greg Pauley (drums) and Lee—their live sound is incredibly tight. That might be due to their three-plus years together, beginning with an inaugural show at The Pinch in Columbia Heights, where they unfortunately invested more money on the sound engineer and bar bill than they made in return.

In early 2016, Lee, Mohl, and a former member who later moved met through “friends of friends of friends,” and one of them suggested getting together on Tuesdays to drink whiskey and play an instrument or two.

“There was more whiskey than music for the first six months,” Mohl says.

Mohl, a lawyer by day, is the chosen ringleader of the group, who brought on Sevcik later in 2016 and Pauley in 2017. He lays out the aural tapestry for much of the music, with Sevcik penning melodies and lyrics. In May, Mystery Friends released the LP Past and Future Self, which Sevcik says really “resonated” as a project title.

“[With] the growth that we had as a band, the title kind of made sense,” Sevcik says. “We listened to our early stuff, our EP, and we were like, ‘Whoa, this is a real departure from what we started off making.’”

Indeed, the album does take the arc of an evolution, starting with the post-punk vibes of “See Right Through” and slowly advancing to the futuristic “Disappear,” where Sevcik’s distant vocals recall those of Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins.

Sevcik says she’s not a fan of authoring “love lyrics” and favors text that leaves room for interpretation. “I’ll just keep on walking till my feet forget,” one of the more poignant lines on the album, was simply a phrase that came into her head and stuck with her.

“Even though I’m a very happy person, I tend to write really sad lyrics,” Sevcik says with a laugh, “which I think some vocalists can relate to.”

The band counts LCD Soundsystem, Talking Heads, Blondie (They do a mean “Rapture”) and David Bowie among their key influences, and brand their own style as “moderately danceable.” In fact, they’re currently setting their sights on an EP of dance tracks tailored to get audiences moving. They’re playing shows in Richmond and Raleigh in November, and also considering a future tour of the Southwest. And from talking to them, it sounds like just continuing to make music together may be a goal in and of itself.

“It isn’t lost on any of us how much we’re all friends,” Lee says.

Mystery Friends plays Pie Shop on Friday at 8 p.m. with Nah. and The Eli Lev Collective. Tickets $12.