The best bands often make what could be called a sublime racket—music that swings between being pretty and being clamorous, and sometimes manages to be both at the same time. That’s an effect England’s Fuck Buttons achieves regularly over the course of its recent full-length debut, Street Horrrsing, a record that sounds like the soundtrack for an awesome tempest in the mind’s eye. Composed with vintage synthesizers and junk-shop percussion tools by former art-school classmates Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, Street Horrrsing is cast in oceanic terms, slabs of heavy distortion swelling to unsafe heights before toppling to shore, leaving a flash of serenity before the next wave comes crashing in.

When they started the group in 2004, Hung and Power were bent on becoming noise terrorists, stirring up the kind of ruckus that would push audiences away. Over time, though, melodies starting creeping into the mix, running like cracks through the duo’s fearsome wall of sound.

“Confrontation is not really something we’re interested in anymore,” Power says, reached on the road in Kentucky. “When we first started, we were more interested in making aggressive music that almost forces people to turn away. But that’s taken a complete U-turn; now we’re exploring the embracing aspects of music.”

That push-pull tension plays out on Street Horrrsing’s “Bright Tomorrow”, which sets a pair of shimmering tone patterns against a martial beat, the intertwined melodies achieving an almost hymnlike splendour before the distortion sets in, at which point Power’s processed vocal shrieks herald the apocalypse. That shift from transcendence to malevolence occurs in almost every track on the album, lending the duo’s music an element of predictability that’s perhaps its only glaring fault. While they don’t write songs in the traditional sense, Hung admits it can be easy for the bandmates to fall into patterns.

“The more you do anything, the more habitual it can become,” says the Englishman. “The way we stop ourselves from doing that is by using new instruments every time out. For instance, Ben is really talented when it comes to playing guitar, but he hasn’t touched a guitar throughout the career of Fuck Buttons. That’s the sort of strategy that helps take us out of our comfort zone.”

When they play live, Hung and Power set up an array of synthesizers and found objects—including a Fisher-Price microphone—on tables facing each other, an approach that makes them seem like a pair of mad scientists cooking up an experiment. Judging by the concert footage on the band’s MySpace page, Fuck Buttons puts on the kind of show that keeps audiences transfixed—not by the band itself, but by whatever people see when they close their eyes.

Fuck Buttons plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Friday (April 18).