So many bands these days equate on-stage energy with relentless thrashing, destroying instruments and spitting on the crowd. For Kenosha Kid, energy comes from the ability to speak without speaking.

“Words are so cumbersome,” said Dan Nettles, guitarist and frontman of Kenosha Kid. “I was writing a lot in high school, but then after a while I was like, ‘It’s so much easier to say what I want to say with a guitar than with these boxy words.’”

Over the past five years, Kenosha Kid has become an Athens music staple. Its music is, in a word, different, floating seamlessly between jazz, rock, blues, funk and country.

“It’s a jazz attitude,” said bassist Neal Fountain. That attitude is about redefinition.

Previously, the band has toured, playing live music alongside the silent film “Steamboat Bill Jr.,” a comedy rooted in the South. The songs themselves were heavily blues-influenced.

Kenosha Kid’s most recent work, culminating in the upcoming Friday release of its second full-length album “Fahrenheit,” was a 10-song set inspired by Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” The album, Kenosha’s foray into the future, is rippling with intricate melodies and haunted by dark undertones. It occasionally spirals into a futuristic fuzz only to bounce back into the refrain.

“I think most of our audience members know to expect the unexpected,” Nettles said. “It makes it exciting.”

Even without a vocalist, Kenosha Kid’s music is based on melodies that stick in the back of one’s throat.

“One of the things about Athens and rock music and all [is] there’s fewer rules,” Nettles said. “It’s kind of nice to embrace that spirit. We put this together like a rock record.”

Kenosha Kid has received rave reviews from critics across the country – no small feat from a group that is well outside the realm of popular music. According to the band, its popularity is because of its energy – its ability to wordlessly communicate on stage and build a musical atmosphere of its own.

“The audience,” Nettles said, “they like it best when we are really into it and expressing something that’s in our heads.”

According to Fountain, it is always the band’s job to produce a “dialogue” between the performers that can bridge those on stage and those in the seats.

“Ninety percent of the people that are there are there to see intensity,” he said. “They’re not at their jobs . thinking about what harmonic changes we’re gonna make week to week; they’re there to see the bucket of energy that comes out when we do what we’ve got to do.”

The band varies in actual number of performers, drawing from a pool Nettles refers to as the “tribe.” The common denominator among these members is the possession of a certain musical vocabulary.

Although it’s taken years, from playing with imaginary bands as kids to the present day, Nettles, Fountain and company have found a group of like-minded individuals in Kenosha Kid.

“I think at some point in this modern age I end up picking my family members, and these are them. It’s just natural,” Nettles said.