illfunk isn’t afraid of a little hard work. That’s why it only took him a few months to build his group SixTwoSeven from a mostly theoretical solo project to a full band on the cusp of something much bigger. Since the start of 2016, SixTwoSeven has grown from just illfunk into a quintet that includes two of his brothers. The Seattle band this spring also teamed with producer Jack Endino (Nirvana, Soundgarden) to record the four-song EP Some Other’s Day (due Aug. 5), and lined up the group’s first-ever live gig, with a tour to follow.

And though illfunk has been playing music since he was 5 years old, he’s mostly been a drummer. SixTwoSeven marks the first time he has played guitar in a band. “One of the most surreal experiences was watching a childhood hero of mine like Jack Endino walking around the studio playing air guitar to my solos,” he says.

It was another of the singer’s inspirations that inspired him to seek an audience for the songs he’d been writing and recording in private over the past six years, while raising a family and working a day job. After seeing the British rockers Muse perform in Seattle last December, illfunk decided his time had come to get off the sidelines.

“I left that show just being so inspired,” he says. “I could not stop thinking about wanting to be onstage, to the point where I was obsessive about it. So I made a website and dropped this recording I had on the internet.”

The track he posted amassed 1,000 streams the first day, and “that was enough to get me excited about it,” illfunk says. With help from childhood friend and local producer Mike Knapp, he cleaned up the sound of his home demos and, working some connections, got them to Endino. When the producer called from a beach in South America to say he wanted to produce an EP, illfunk began turning SixTwoSeven into an ensemble that includes Knapp on bass, Jason Bilderback on guitar, Matt Bilderback on keys and backing vocals and Dave Cook on drums.

Along with one new song, the lean, chugging rocker “One Single Night,” Some Other’s Day comprises three tunes from the catalog of music that illfunk had stockpiled over the years. They’re intense tunes, drawn from his own experience: Powered by a bright snarl of guitar, “Top of the World” is about illfunk’s contentious divorce, while he wrote the mournful, minor-key “Joshua’s Song” after administering CPR to a young man on a four-wheeler who had been struck by several cars after zooming onto the highway. “He ended up dying in my arms on the side of the road while we waited for the paramedics,” he says. “I wrote the song about it. It was the only way I could process the experience.”

Writing songs has long been the way that illfunk has expressed himself. Though he’s performed in various band over the years, and has had the sense since he was little that he was a born entertainer, his path to rock ’n’ roll frontman had been circuitous. “I’ve worked in every shithole factory in Washington state there is to work in as a trained electrician,” says illfunk. Though he later became a power engineer, and now works a comfortable desk job, he still identifies with the lunch-pail kid he used to be, and his music reflects it.

“I want to be a champion for the underdog,” he says. “We have kind of a motto: ‘We come with the attitude of an underdog while delivering the punch of a champion.’”