After sitting down to speak with The Virgins, it was almost easy to see how they played their first show in front of eight friends in Brooklyn and their third show with Patti Smith and Sonic Youth before a crowd of 3,000 in Paris. Dizzyingly precocious with their sweetly silly, helter-skelter banter and unaffected zeal, they have made a meteoric rise unusual in the music industry but somehow fitting of their zany tenacity.

The four band members, singer Donald Cummings, bassist Nick Zarin-Ackerman, guitarist Wade Oates, and drummer Erik Ratensperger, will have you and your grandma dancing faster than you can say “Rich Girl,” with their poppy, funky, rock-your-socks-offy music. Dexterously navigating through a world of genres with infectious appeal, The Virgins might just cross the bipartisan divide even more effectively than Barack Obama.

As their celebrity grows, the band retains a sense of humility. Of playing with music legends Patti Smith and Sonic Youth, Zarin-Ackerman admitted to OTR, “In Paris we just spent twenty minutes in a pure state of panic, white-hot panic.” Since then, the band has had a song featured on Gossip Girl and become the talk of the town at this year’s CMJ, following their success at SXSW.

Friday night, they took to the stage at Mercury Lounge, where their loopy antics and irresistible pop charmed even the most cynical audience members. Disarmingly youthful and intoxicated with the thrill of performing, their aerobic performance bounced between exuberantly gawky dancing and microphone tossing, with Cummings even throwing his own shirt over spilled beer on the stage in disregard for things less important than fun.

Perhaps what is so appealing about The Virgins’ live show, though, is their obvious rapport; when asked what defined The Virgins, Cummings said, “What makes us ‘us’ is that we’re best friends.” Together the best friends have skipped to the top of the musical podium, spent off-hours on tour seeing Stepbrothers four times, and played unabashedly.

They may be called The Virgins, but the four friends will keep you on your knees asking for more of their orgasmically danceable hits.