Tonight, the Zoo serves up a quartet of Brisbane’s best noise merchants in what could easily be billed as the battle of the shouty-screamy bands. It’s enough to warm the cockles of any fan of the angry, edgy and frantic edge of the musical spectrum.

Frou Frou Foxes open proceedings sporting a very fashionable twin-guitar-plus-drums set-up. It might appear the same as their better-known brethren I Heart Hiroshima, but that’s where the resemblance ends. The three-piece focus inward, projecting a dark and brooding sound that belies their bass-less nature and plays nicely with the (sadly) thin early-evening crowd. Half-heard lyrics scud like soap scum along streams of black guitar that whine and swirl. Be nice if they projected themselves a little more, though, instead of letting the music do all the work.

Scul Hazzards reinforce the three-piece theme, but opt for a more traditional guitar-bass-drums holy trinity to showcase their aural powers. And it sounds plenty fine – the seductive bass lines of Tiffany Milne drive the songs forward, while the guitar and vocals of frontman Lachlan Anderson wail in and out of the tunes like some nutcase weaving through peak-hour traffic. The highlight is a delicious 10-minute opus that’s almost post-rock in the way Anderson’s guitar and vocals vary ever-so-subtly around the heady, repeated bass refrain. Yum.

Turnpike might appear somewhat anonymous at first glance, but put a few instruments in their hands and be prepared to be completely blown apart. Opening with Like a Highway, the trio strike harder than a cobra armed with a small thermonuclear bomb. The pace is as fast as we’ve seen tonight, the snares rasping and Adam King’s guitar fuzzing madly and striking all the wrong notes in an oh-so-right way. Raucous, energetic and unapologetically old school, their set is the perfect primer for the headliner.

If anyone in the Zoo is happier than the members of I Heart Hiroshima tonight, they’ve been chewing down pills by the handful. “Holy shit we’ve got an album!” exclaims drummer Susie Patten after Brisbane’s favourite three-piece announce their arrival with a blistering version of new song Captain to Captain that immediately gets those at the front bouncing with excitement.

The set that follows is heavy with tracks from debut long-player Tuff Teef, but it’s all to the good as the band rips out some of the tastiest pop hooks you’re likely to hear this year. Surgery, Crime, Throw that Metal – the crisp, jangly guitar sounds of Matthew Somers and Cameron Hawes mesh delightfully with manic back-and-forth off-kilter vocals in the style that’s become the group’s trademark.

In between, they toss in older EP tracks and Patten wrangles drunken hecklers with aplomb. Perennial favourite Neutron Popsong still goes off, but the stolid structures of Reckless benchmarks prove just how far the band has progressed with Tuff Teef. In fact, by the time they wind up with their new single, Punks, it’s difficult to believe that 50 minutes has flown past – it feels like five. A brief break and they’re back with champagne in hand. The bottle ends up with the front row, and IHH close out with the instrumentally sparse, but addictive Stop That. Apt, but in the greater scheme of things, surely the message is: please don’t!