For a band that regularly name drops Dostoevsky and sings about socio-economic hardships in the south, you think Ha Ha Tonka would destroy anyone that stood between them and a simple trivia contest.

With six bachelor degrees between their four-piece band, they should have easily won the Record Bar’s weekly Thursday night trivia. After enduring over an hour of wrong answers and missed opportunities, Team Tonk finally pulled out enough responses to end the night in a respectable third place.

“Hell of a way to start a tour,” Lead singer Brian Roberts joked. “It’s going to be all downhill from here, right?”

For a band that tallied over 150 shows last year, the Kansas City via The Ozarks group uses nights like this to build morale and to simply have fun.

The band has been steadily gaining national attention with last year’s Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South including an appearance at Lollapalooza and several glowing reviews from the likes of SPIN and Rolling Stone. With this tour, they will cross the country twice and make an appearance at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, TX. This could be the tour that breaks them out of the Midwest for good.

But of course, the first show always sets the tone of how the rest of the tour goes. From the first notes of Pendergast Machine and on, the band was already approaching the manic energy of a band in mid-tour form but doing it with the intensity that is needed to convey some of the rather dark themes of their last album.

Ha Ha Tonka didn’t pull any punches in recreating the rich, harmonic sounds of Novel Sounds. The band huddled together around the front mics to put a four-part harmony together for Hold my Feet to the Fire which was met with an fifth voice from the near capacity crowd. Even with the band’s deeper catalog cuts from Buckle in the Bible Belt, the crowd kept up with nearly every word.

Even with their last album a mere six month in the rear view, the band was already pulling out over five new songs for the crowd.

“We aren’t recording or releasing an album anytime soon,” Roberts said. “But we always have to keep working and moving what we want people to see forward. Always.”

When this tour finishes in April, the band will be taking a short hiatus before hitting the road for a second leg this summer, including possible stops on the summer festival circuit.

“It is always incredible to see crowds that big and to hit that kind of audience,” Anderson said. “Incredible and strange. [laugh] If we can get there again, it will be fantastic.”

With the phenomenal ability to weave tales of the south from a time nearly forgotten and to make it relevant and above all, personal, to today’s audience, Ha Ha Tonka will be able to take that inevitable next step into the national spotlight.