Nothing is more punk than playing pop at a punk show.

Just ask Trouble, who capped an evening of aggressive music last Tuesday night at Empire Books with a comparatively catchy set of mostly new material.

Though the Greensboro garage rockers, including senior Danny Saperstein on guitar and vocals and junior Marshall Grossman on drums, generated little audience feedback at first, the immediate lack of response may have had more to do with the group’s genre experimentation than any issue with material.

Take Trouble’s first song, one of many new, untitled numbers.

With University of North Carolina at Greensboro senior and Trouble guitarist Kelly Fahey stomping on one of his seven effects pedals during the chorus, soaking the lead line in agreeable garage rock fuzz, there’s a lot to dance along to.

Mix in Saperstein’s My Bloody Valentine-style tremolo guitar playing with Grossman’s jaunty, full-bodied drumming, and a song at first accessible becomes hidden behind a wall of stark textures and rhythms.

What kind of dance can you do to a song like that? The concertgoers did not seem to know.

Technical difficulties may have also short-circuited the connection between band and audience.

After only the first song, Fahey temporarily ran out of power to his texture-adding pedals.  From across the room, UNCG senior and bassist Tristan Munchel made the inevitable pun.

“Looks like we’re in trouble,” said Munchel.

Contrasting with earlier sets from locals Dumpster, debuting a rock opera called “Robot Man is from the Future” and the band Kaleidoscope Death, who played structureless noise rock in front of a projection of a French film about sea urchins, Trouble’s night-ending set hung jagged textures on — here is what was strange for the night — catchy hooks.

“It’s fun music,” said concert-goer and first-year Katie Karelson later that night. “They remind me of a really young Black Lips.”

In an interview with The Guilfordian later in the week, Grossman joked about the more accessible half of Trouble’s music.

“We joke all the time that our music is like Disney movies,” said drummer and junior Marshall Grossman, laughing. “It’s literally like the soundtrack to Disney movies, if you break it down and sing the melodies.”

With darker songs like “Hi Hell” and Ramones-bassist-referencing “Dee Dee’s Terror,” it will be a long time before Trouble’s music ends up in “High School Musical 4.”

Trouble seeks to merge both the pretty and the confrontational.

“(We try to avoid) letting genres stop us from taking on structures or melodies that speak to us,” said Saperstein.

As any music lover knows, genre can be more of a prison than anything else. The resistance to that prison is part of Trouble’s history.

Before Trouble, Grossman and Saperstein played around Guilford with party band To Harrow. Eventually, the group outgrew the constraints of their genre, deciding to start their current band.

“We just kept hearing all these sections in our songs that were something else,” said Saperstein.

By Trouble’s second-to-last song — another new, unnamed track — the group began to reach their dance-reluctant audience. Grossman thumped the floor tom with Ramones-esque urgency while Saperstein and Fahey chased each other and with spiraling guitar harmonies, sacrificing neither the power of punk nor the grip of pop.

Judged by the crowd humming the melody of this song as they left the venue, Trouble made some converts.

Trouble’s self-titled EP comes out in March