Jordan Smith seems somewhat bemused by the fact that his musical project is riding a wave of critical hyperbole. Noisey’s Drew Millard, for instance, called it “the best band in the goddamn universe”.

Reached at home in Nashville, Smith admits that when you’ve given your rock ’n’ roll combo the name Diarrhea Planet, you have to work extra hard to win people over. The name was a jape affixed to what was never intended to be more than a party band. Against all expectations, however, Diarrhea Planet started to get popular.

“When we realized it was picking up we were like, ‘We’ve got to keep this stuff sharp, at this level,’ ” singer-guitarist Smith says. “Otherwise people are going to be like, ‘These guys are just a bunch of assholes who are going for shock value,’ you know?

“There are so many bands that come out that will try to do something shocking, and they’re only around for a year or two, and once that factor wears off, what do you do after that? So your only means to push your band as far as you can is to take it seriously and try to be good.”

Smith and his bandmates have accomplished that and then some on their latest LP, Turn to Gold. Tracks like “Life Pass” and “Ain’t a Sin to Win” are blasts of it’s-so-fucking-great-to-be-alive riff rock.

Produced by Grammy winner Vance Powell (whose engineering c.v. includes records by the White Stripes, the Dead Weather, and pretty much everything else Jack White has done), Turn to Gold marks Diarrhea Planet as a go-to act for anyone jonesing for a guitar fix. After all, the group features four skilled six-stringers, all equally adept at lead and rhythm playing.

Smith says that having all those guitars blasting away at the same time satisfies his long-held desire to craft a titanic sound both on-stage and in the studio.

“One of the main things that I always struggled with in a lot of my bands was that live it just didn’t sound big enough,” he says. “I had never really thought about ‘Oh yeah, just have a billion guitars.’ I saw a band from New Jersey called Liquor Store about five or six years ago play here in Nashville. They played with, like, five guitar players.

“It was so cool. It was just so overloaded and over-the-top. So that started making me think. And I’ve been a lifelong Smashing Pumpkins fan; they’ve always been my favourite band since I was, like, four. One of their things was that in the studio they would sound massive, because they would just layer all these guitars.”

It isn’t all fist-pumping anthems for these guys, though. “Lie Down” cruises by slowly on a bed of shimmering reverb and shoegazing feedback. Elsewhere, “Hot Topic” is a chugging pop-punk number that shifts gears into a thrash-metal outro guaranteed to bang the head that doesn’t bang, which seems to suggest that heavier things are on the horizon. Smith doesn’t deny it.

“Well, I’m not gonna give away too much, but we might have a little project in the works,” he says. “We might do a little one-off. I think we all agree that we’re finding ourselves drawn to metal more as we get older, or as we keep playing, so there might be a little more metal in the future for DP.”

You read it here first, Diarrhea Planet fans.

Diarrhea Planet plays the Rickshaw Theatre next Friday (August 26).