What do you get when you mix five guys and women’s footwear? Indie rock, apparently. Stiletto is a five-piece band out of the Akron area and members Chad Tisch, Mike DeCarlo, Ryan Chiera, Kyle Shave and Allen Cooper Gilleland have been playing together for six years. “I’ve been with Ryan ever since I learned how to play, so I’ve been with him for about 10 years,” DeCarlo said. “We sort of just met everyone through the local music scene when we were in high school. I think it’s been about six years with these five people.” None of the guys in the group had been playing the type of music Stiletto plays — “indie dance rock,” as Tisch likes to call it — but they happened to settle into that genre. “I was tired of all the noise. I wanted to see what we could do when we really sat down and tried to write songs,” DeCarlo said. What they ended up with was a sound a little reminiscent of the pop-punk bands of the early 2000s, like Copeland, Cartel and The Starting Line. Tisch’s vocals are clean, but they have enough edge to keep him in the rock range. Backing his singing is grooving guitars and bass lines. There’s versatility to Stiletto’s songs, too. They are upbeat enough that you could easily dance to them, but they are also great driving songs, where you can just pop the record in and sing along. Since Stiletto has that sorta-indie, sorta-punk, sorta-rock sound, they are generally thrown into the “emo” genre that used to be a catch-all for a band with any kind of emotion. “Normally when people first hear [our music], they just assume it’s emo,” DeCarlo said. “That’s not really the goal. We’re definitely not sad at all.” In July, Cleveland’s own Rover, host of Rover’s Morning Glory on 100.7, fell into that same emo trap. Every year, the show has Roverfest, and local bands enter to get on the bill. “I was in Myrtle Beach at the time. I started getting all these text messages from my cousins and brother,” Tisch said. “They’re like, ‘You guys were just on the radio!’” Decarlo’s brother entered Stiletto into the pool of about 300 bands and a clip of Stiletto’s song “Snowed In” was played on Rover’s Morning Glory. “It was actually a pretty inspirational song that they played and they sat there and called us emo the whole time,” Tisch said. Stiletto made it into the top 20, but they were not picked to play at Roverfest. If you thought indie rock guys didn’t know how to get down, well, you thought wrong. Tisch is good for kicking his shoes off and dancing around, and he said he’s woken up sore after going a little too hard at the show the night before. “We get crazy,” Tisch said. “We like to climb on things and jump around and act like idiots but still give you a good show at the same time. “We just like people to have a good time,” Tisch said. “We kind of fit in with the bar scene because people are out to drink; they want to have a good time, they want to party. Stuff like that. So I think that’s why we enjoy playing the bar scene.” People notice how much fun they are having, too. “People always come up, and they’re just like, ‘You guys genuinely look like you’re having fun on stage. You look like you guys enjoy playing music together,’” Tisch said. Stiletto’s latest record is “I Finally Invented Something That Works” from 2009, and they are hoping to be back in the studio by the end of this year. The band was on an eight-month hiatus, but in June they started back up again. Stiletto is playing at Musica on September 30 with Come Wind, Felix Culpa and All Get Out. Tickets are $8, and the show starts at 7 p.m.