Few bands can claim that their first live show featured an eight-foot-tall soup can, several Brillo boxes, and a giant cigarette that puffed smoke into the air. Or that the performers had constructed the whole set themselves.

In a landscape where musicians generate the majority of their revenue from tour dates, Chicago three-piece Autograf has mastered the art—quite literally—of the live show. Each coming from a design background, producers Jake Carpenter, Mikul Wing, and Louis Kha stand out from their dance-music peers by tying their tracks to a particular visual creation.

“We make art that inspires our music, and music that inspires our art,” Wing tells the Straight on the line from a tour stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “For our latest release, for example, we’ve created a pop-art print of a bottle of Sriracha. We’ve been giving out the artwork at shows to people who bought presale tickets, and there’s T-shirts with the design on them too.

“For the track before that, ‘Don’t Worry’, we made a few installations based on different themes. One was ‘Don’t worry, eat ice cream,’ and another was ‘Don’t worry about life.’ Each one varied in size from four by four feet, up to a really large one at about eight by 10 feet. It’s always been important to us that art goes hand in hand with what we’ve been doing musically.”

As the group’s visual creations have developed, so has its sound. Beginning its career by writing tropical house music—complete with electronic marimbas, summery beats, and dreamy vocals—the trio has veered off in a new direction with its latest EP, Future Soup. Moving into grittier territory, standout song “Horizons” ups the tempo to create an atmospheric, melody-driven instrumental track, while “Ocean Glass” is built on a classical piano riff, underscored by complex drum patterns.

Despite dedicating most of its time to writing new music, however, the band still found a moment to create a special installation for the accompanying tour.

“When we were finishing the EP, we were thinking about how we could bring an art element on tour,” Wing says. “A lot of big design work is not very portable, so we knew we had to make something practical. We came up with the idea to build a really cool light sculpture.

“We wanted to create a piece of art that would always be on-stage with us, and that we could program to be interactive with the music. All of our lights react to what we’re playing, and the patterns that flash up mesh in time with our tracks.”

Jacks of all trades, Wing, Carpenter, and Kha work across a number of artistic media, allowing the trio to retain creative control over multiple aspects of its music and image—a DIY attitude that the band is quick to clarify.

“It’s not that we don’t want to work with other people,” Wing says. “It’s more that we know that we want a say in everything we do. We don’t want to have a third party come in and tell us, ‘This is what your artwork is going to look like,’ or ‘This is how your stage show is going to be set up.’

“We want to have an active hand in everything that’s going on, and because there’s three of us, we don’t need to outsource anything. We have the ability in our band to do everything between us, and we have time to create art without neglecting the music.

“Working with those visuals definitely makes our show different,” he continues. “We pride ourselves on our originality.”

Autograf plays the Imperial on Friday (November 11).