Make Up the Breakdown, the title of Hot Hot Heat’s latest album, is cryptic enough to fuel the overly creative minds of critics and fans alike. It works perfectly as an attack on the sort of musicians who imprint their discs with fabricated tears and scars. And it is a jibe at publicity-hungry artists who spill tales of conflict in the studio to feed the chaos-friendly media.

But Hot Hot Heat guitarist Dante DeCaro says he isn’t interested in futilely over-analytical readings.

“We just kind of like the way a lot of our song names have repetition,” he explains. “I learned it in high school. It’s like alliteration or something. It kind of bounces off your tongue.”

Hot Hot Heat is currently headlining their own North American tour and stopped off at Boston’s Axis club last week. The show was an exercise in pure manic energy, with singer Steve Bays howling and leaping around the stage like a pill-popping Energizer Bunny.

The set kicked off with “No, Not Now,” showcasing Bays’ throbbing synth beats as he bellowed, “Oh no, she’s not a secret now / The wolves have smelled her scent.” The crowd—mostly glasses-bound pomo punks and largely female—moshed appropriately to highlights “Touch You Touch You” and “Oh, Goddamnit.” The band concluded the short set with massive audience sing-alongs to their hit “Bandages” and encore “This Town.”

DeCaro says the winning formula to the band’s selection of set lists is quite simple.

“We consider things like whether the song’s up-tempo,” he says. “So the whole vibe at the show is that everybody gets grooving.”

Thus, while you can marvel at the band’s artistic credibility and pin them with labels like emo or post-punk, you’d better be bobbing your head while you’re doing it.

And if you want to explain to Dante that the term he’s looking for is “assonance,” not “alliteration,” forget about it. He couldn’t possibly care less.

Hot Hot Heat blazes onto the scene just as a new wave of emerging musicians are learning lessons from the Sex Pistols and the Clash while taking night classes with ABBA. Though the band shares the manic energy of the garage movement and the infectious melodies of the new wave revival, they’re a little too radio-friendly for the former and too raucous for the latter.

Still, they’re not particularly eager to be identified with any specific trend. DeCaro says he’s wary of the press’ insufferable desire to pigeon-hole a handful of bands into a movement.

“That’s another thing that media likes to do,” he says. “They think things sound better when they’re all part of a package. But there’s so many bands in that kind of garage or new wave genre.”

DeCaro also wants the media to back off with the Nirvana comparisons.

“That’s just people trying to make a nice, entertaining story,” he says. “Nirvana’s definitely a band that, when I first became a musician, were very inspirational. But at this point I listen to so many things.”

If DeCaro is a little bitter, it can’t be blamed on his band’s recent fortune. Their hook-riddled single “Bandages” is in rotation at the country’s largest alternative rock outlets. The song’s music video, borrowing heavily from the facial surgery scene in the 1985 film Brazil, maintains heavy rotation in its third month on MTV2.