Pushed to rattle off specific influences for Dilly Dally, singer-guitarist Katie Monks skillfully redirects the conversation, launching instead into a discourse on the state of modern pop.

The best way to look at the Toronto quartet’s debut album, Sore, she suggests, isn’t to pore over a laundry list of the acts that have proven inspirational. Instead, she suggests there’s a good reason Dilly Dally sounds more riotously pissed than L7, Courtney Love, and Babes in Toyland during the glory years of grunge. Boiling things down to basics, Monks and her bandmates—guitarist Liz Ball, bassist Jimmy Tony, and drummer Benjamin Reinhartz—are mostly of the opinion that everything sucks today.

“There are many reference points on the record,” Monks says, on the line from New York City, where Dilly Dally is playing CMJ. “Some of them haven’t been made properly in a long time. It’s important for people to remember parts of the past and music history—to remember Sonic Youth or Nirvana and maybe start thinking about guitars again. And not what the mainstream is for that stuff right now. It just feels boring after a certain point, listening to all the bands that sound like Arcade Fire and Passion Pit.”

Just getting warmed up, she continues: “While we’re talking about the culture conversation and guitar music, there’s the whole beachwave thing that’s been happening over the past seven years. That’s another thing where I’m just ‘Oh, man.’ It bores me. I like when people switch it up—I really do. And I don’t like it when people in the industry just keep dishing out the same stuff over and over again. It’s been seven years of beachwave and Real Estate. That shit happened seven years ago, and yet everything still sounds like that. That’s just weird and boring.”

No one’s accused Dilly Dally of being boring on Sore, a record that’s marked by deliriously distorted cat-scratch guitars and Monks’s fantastically scorched, slurred vocals. “Desire” finds the band as inelegantly wasted as Pretty on the Inside–era Hole, and “Ballin Chain” channels class-of-’94 college rock with dreamy results. The messy mudhoneyed blues of “Snake Head” is the best thing this side of scoring with Jennifer Herrema, while the stark-piano-and-serrated-vocals outro of “Burned by the Cold” suggests that Dilly Dally is capable of something more than sloppy and loud.

The record came together organically, with Monks and Ball trusting their gut feelings rather than overthinking everything.

“I’m not a nerd—I don’t remember exactly how to create different guitar sounds and then reference them later,” Monks says. “We just do what feels right in a way that acknowledges the spirit of certain bands from certain times. There’s a real feeling to it, and it’s not self-indulgent and it’s not wrapped up in a tight little bow that’s super-digestible. It’s unapologetic and very raw.”

That Monks has ended up in a band isn’t surprising. Her brother David is the singer-bassist for veteran Toronto indie kings Tokyo Police Club, and that gave her an early look at life on-stage.

“I was 16 and he was 18 when he started playing big shows,” she says. “Everyone was talking about him, and I was a kid in high school. I was a fan. I looked up at him on the stage and I was like, ‘Yeah—I wanna do that.’ ”

It would take half a decade for Dilly Dally to truly jell, things finally coalescing with the addition last year of Reinhartz and Tony. Still, as tightly locked in as all four musicians are on howling monsters like “The Touch” and “Get to You”, it’s arguably the tandem of Ball and Monks that drives the band. For as long as they’ve been playing together, people have been pushing them to swerve from their original vision. Both have refused to budge.

“There’s a lot of shit and a lot of assholes in the music industry,” Monks says bluntly. “But when you’re wandering through the whole mess of it, and you find somebody who’s genuine, who fucking cares, and is a true artist in the business for the right reasons, that’s beautiful.”

And right from the beginning, both knew they were in it for the long haul.

Of course, there’s a long list of folks who’ve stubbornly stuck to their artistic guns. A lot of them came from the early ’90s, a time when you could be as chaotic, messy, and sonically ugly as you wanted and still find yourself on a major label playing huge festivals. None of those acts need be name-checked by Monks—one listen to the uncompromising and unrelentingly great Sore and you’ll be able to figure them out.

The unswerving dedication of Monks and Ball to a sound that, for years, was out of fashion has them now at the front of a great wave of Toronto noise-punk extremists that includes heavy hitters like Metz, Greys, and HSY. As a result, Dilly Dally has been flagged as a band on the rapid rise everywhere from the Guardian to Pitchfork. Interestingly, Monks suggests her group’s unholy roar is the sound of raw frustration being channelled into something that’s weirdly positive.

“Liz and I have always known that this is going to be our life’s work,” she says. “Whether there’s money or whether there isn’t, this is happening. Because people try and fuck with that is why we’ve sometimes got frustrated. We’ve never got frustrated by not getting recognition. Where the frustration comes from is getting fucked over by people not respecting the path that we’ve chosen for ourselves.”

Dilly Dally plays the Media Club on Tuesday (October 27).