There are few bands who can honestly say that the first day a member could legally drink, they played a bar gig, and for an encore, just mere months later, won $25,000 in a local radio station band contest. But for Calgary's indie dance punk quintet, the Shagbots, it’s just the beginning.

“The day Michael [de Souza] turned 18, we had our first bar show. After that, things started to pick up, we started to get more serious about it,” explains his brother and fellow band member Davis de Souza. Huddled at a table with the rest of the Shagbots, underneath an enormous projection of an NHL playoff game at The Palomino, it seems difficult to imagine that the band is so young.

However, before they could legally buy a beer, they had already achieved more than most bands do during a lifetime — and their debut full-length has yet to be released. Perhaps that’s why Davis seems so easy to talk to: his stories spill out with a breathlessly self-deprecating wit.

“We’re the shit heads of Calgary,” he says. “We’re misfits; we’ve always been misfits. We don’t have a huge following of hipsters in Calgary. I think people are afraid to like us, almost.”

“We got that from Day One, just from our name,” pipes in Devin Boudreau. This time, he’s not partially hidden by his six-string Fender.

“We ostracized ourselves with our name... dumb fucking name. We’re absolutely, totally on our own,” exclaims Davis, in mock exasperation.

Name concerns aside, the quartet feel like they have made all the right choices in life. With their debut album, We Were Born Tigers — where the bulk of their $25, 000 winnings from Fuel 90.3 were spent — set to be released on May 8, the Shagbots may be totally on their own, but they are not lonely, at least not live. Their polymorphous, rhythmic dance punk has caught the hips and bops of many, despite not readily fitting nicely into the Calgary scene.

“I think our songs are not about us as a band,” explains Davis, “but about the people who are in front of us. When we played Broken City with Bad Flirt, that was one of the best crowds we had. It totally changed the songs we played. Those songs were not the same when we played them there as when we played them on a Tuesday night at The Stetson with some rock band from Vancouver.”

The songs not only morph depending on the crowd’s energy and interaction, but well before that as well: Everyone in the band has played another’s instrument at some point or another. “If someone has trouble writing a vocal part, then someone else will do it,” Davis says. “If one guy can’t get a drum part right, we’ll swap instruments. That’s how we have all different sounding songs.”

“Michael is so skilled on so many instruments,” says bassist and guitarist Taylor McKee, “When you’re worried about keeping a song together, he can step in and hold it. A guy like Devin is so good on guitar. It’s helpful to have guys that are so good at their instruments that they can reign us in when it all gets out of control.”

Their live energy, merely alluded to on record, feels comfortingly out of control. This, however, is precisely what makes each live show unique. “Music, at least to me, is not just the actual sound,” says Davis. “There’s got to be a feel to it.” Look for that feeling in your legs, in your loins, in your throat at a bar near you.