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IN 1994, SHAWN MARTINSON, who now plays guitar and screams in the Quincy noise-grunge trio Bugs and Rats, was working at Quincy Records — a dream gig for a punk-rock fanatic about to enter high school — when a kid named Radek Wierzbowski came into the store. "I noticed him because he bought a Black Flag tape," Martinson recalls. "He was my age. When you’re 14, it just sticks in your head, you know what I mean?" Little did he know that the seeds to a long friendship and musical partnership had just been planted. Soon afterward, the two ran into each other at a show in Quincy that Martinson’s band Amino Acids were playing. They bonded while huffing airbrush propellant out of a can in the parking lot and subsequently started playing music together.

Wierzbowski was the original bass player in Brando, the first band all three members of Bugs and Rats — Martinson, Wierzbowski, and Kellzo — played in together. (Yes, Kellzo is now a member of both the Glow and Bugs and Rats.) "For the most part we were just a kind of a generic hardcore band: fast part, breakdown," Martinson says of Brando. Then his musical style and that of Kettleson, the band’s other primary songwriter, began to diverge, and he started writing music that was more intense and less structured than your typical hardcore. "We got over the top with doing noise-type shit. Then it got to the point where I don’t know if people in the band — maybe Benzo or whoever — I don’t think they were as into that type of shit and it just became me writing all the songs. It just became my thing. Then it just drifted off, people lost interest."

Brando fizzled out, and in early 2002, Martinson moved in with Kellzo in Queens, where his life consisted of working as a "jizz mopper" at a porno shop with peep-show booths, smoking weed, and watching TV. "But I was writing shitloads of songs that weren’t Brando type shit at all." That material would evolve into a blueprint for Bugs and Rats when Martinson moved back to Massachusetts in mid 2002 and hooked up with Wierzbowski with the intention of picking up where Brando had left off.

Growing up, the members of Bugs and Rats had been obsessed with Nirvana. And that led them, like a lot of young Nirvana fans, deeper underground, to bands like Black Flag, the Melvins, Sonic Youth, and Bikini Kill. "Nirvana was the catalyst for all that shit," Martinson explains. "In every interview, Kurt Cobain would drop band names and I would always go out and buy those bands." Hardcore and early grunge, especially the heavier, noisier end of the spectrum, made a major impression on Martinson, and you can hear their influence on Bugs and Rats in his sludgy riffing, feedback bursts, and disembodied howls, in Kellzo’s unmerciful drum punishing, and in Wierzbowski’s thick, bottom-heavy bass sound.

Songwriting is an organic, almost instinctual process for the band. "We don’t really write songs," says Martinson. "I’ll have a song — a riff and a vocal pattern — and I’ll start playing, and Radek and Kellzo will instantly know what to do. Two times through and it’s done." Kellzo was a music-production and engineering major in college, and he usually records as they go. They had built up a solid batch of songs when a bunch of Kellzo’s recording gear — thousands of dollars worth, including a hard drive with a significant number of recordings — got stolen early last year. The band decided to try recording in a proper studio, and in mid 2004 they laid down 30 songs in three hours. Even though everything, including the vocals, was done live, the tracks were too slick for their taste. So after Kellzo built up a workable set-up again, they recorded their debut full-length, the gloriously lo-fi Smart As a Whip, at their practice space. It’s slated for July release on Not Common Records, the Quincy-based label run by Joe McNamara and former Disengaged frontman Dan Beakey. In the meantime, some of Bugs and Rats’ early recordings are available on-line at Beakey’s Web site, www.quincyforest.com.

Bugs and Rats perform tonight, May 26, at Fuji Restaurant, 1546 Hancock Street in Quincy; call (617) 770-1546. They also play on Friday June 10 at Dee Dee’s, 297 Newport Avenue in Quincy; call (617) 328-5938. The Glow play on Thursday June 9 at Great Scott, 1222 Commonwealth Avenue in Allston; call (617) 451-2622.