Devolution is weighing on Infomatik’s minds. Not in the sense that they’re art-punk progressives being interviewed at a sterile espresso nook in lower Queen Anne, and not even in the way the local trio giddily bandies about the Devo-coined “jocko homo” to describe Bellingham party thugs (“It’s a great code word,” bassist/vocalist Ben Larson laughs, then reconsiders. “Well, it’s not that much of a code word . . . “). Nah, it’s that time-honored bane of all unproven, fledgling bands: Life outside of Infomatik is a synapse-stultifying, endlessly looping Day Job, and Booji Boys are lurking everywhere.

“I’ve seen people dress up their cubicle like it was a dorm room,” drummer Colin English recalls of his former Earthlink gig. “When Lord of the Rings came out, this one guy went to Burger King and collected all of the glasses. He had them prominently displayed on top of his cubicle like ‘This is the Grail.'”

“But those are the types of people who grow up,” guitarist/ keyboardist Geoff Gardner suggests, “and switch over to the cat motif at some point in their life.”

“Yeah, like ‘I Hate Mondays,'” Larson interjects. “No, no, what is that wet cat poster?”

“‘Hang in There,'” English answers. “The cat’s hanging from a tree. It’s mandatory. Then I think you eventually slide into the Country Kitchen thing where you get the potpourri bowls.”

“Or some sort of checkerboard [gingham] print for your desktop,” Gardner adds.

These are all very, very good reasons to lose yourself on tour, or at least aspire to losing yourself on tour, but it’s not like all the world’s a Williamsburg once you get out of Dodge. Wasn’t it just yesterday that you heard the latest Staind Temple Doors Down smash on the radio and bitched, “Man, if they all gotta sound like one band, couldn’t they at least have picked someone good?” Careful what you wish for. It took a while, but “they” finally picked the finest, most credible of muses: Joy Division.

Now, much like those suspiciously storm trooper–esque clones lined up in attack formation at the end of the last Star Wars, commercial alternative radio is in the process of being invaded by battalions of Series 2 Joy Divisions. Or is that Series 2 New Orders? Interpol, the Stills, the Walkmen, and the Killers claim that they want to save us from jocko homos with arms wide open, but are we so desperate to escape that we’ll jump aboard a night boat built on style, not (hacking cough) substance?

Infomatik don’t have the answer, but they are defecting to their own reliable, if makeshift, life raft; Larson, English, and Gardner are impressively at ease with the circuitry that connects style and substance, form and function. They have just one four-song demo to hawk at the end of their set, which is automatically memorable for two clashing reasons: (a) The lads ingeniously slit open hundreds of floppy disks to house the disc, a gesture so brilliantly simple you wonder if they’re the first to execute it, and (b) the sonic contents therein largely flaunt propulsive, repetitive, hollowed-out bass notes and jittery everyman paranoia. Love isn’t necessarily tearing Infomatik apart, but the influence is obvious (hell, their first gig was a Joy Division covers night). So why not throw them on the solid-gold scrap heap with the aforementioned blew-wave pretenders?

Exhibit A: youth. The demo—expertly executed, incidentally—is not indicative of Infomatik’s new direction, or at least the direction indicated by two rough cuts Larson let me sample. “Kill Your Idols” can barely contain its own springy Johnny B. Riff, which gallops like a puppy alongside a dour, claustrophobic synth line. In not immediately conjuring an early ’80s reference point, “Idols” begins to build a vocabulary that is Infomatik’s and Infomatik’s alone.

Exhibit B: intellectual curiosity. The second of the two new tracks, “Ghosting,” spreads hot, hot hi-hat tickling over a droned, incomprehensible chant. (“We were doing this backwards reverb thing on the vocals, and it got out of hand,” Larson explains, “but we’re gonna try to pull that back.”) The title references the eerie, falsely replicated images that sometimes plague your television, and Larson’s explanation plays on the personal-is-paranormal undercurrent. “If you were navigating your own life, and your life was the regular cable image, but you’re aware of an alternate bleed-over image in the same space, that’s . . . well, getting at what the song’s about.”

That metaphor alone slays the genre’s typical doomed-romance grist. Sure, these are just two rough cuts from a band that hasn’t even toured friggin’ Oregon yet, but they’re worth getting excited about. Fresh pinpricks within established constructs require inspiration and imagination. Infomatik has no paucity of that, visually or conceptually. Whether the music continues to follows suit, well, that’s what evolution is all about, right?

abonazelli@seattleweekly.com

Infomatik play Chop Suey at 9 p.m. with XOXOXO, Scream Club, DJ Paco, DJ Fucking in the Streets, and DJ Kendra. Wed., June 9. $5.