In September, while their friends back in Los Angeles tended to the everyday matters of their lives, the three members of the power trio King The Kid loaded their gear and quietly left L.A. and drove to Bend.

Once here, they spent the fall holed up in the vacation home of singer and bassist David Michael Frank’s parents, where they did anything but keep quiet. The three effectively turned the house into one large recording studio: drums were set up in the living room, guitar amplifiers in closets, their computer and other gear in the master bedroom.

“It works really well for a studio environment, because the living room’s very large,” Frank says. “The acoustics are great, and we have the house pretty much wired up with multiple sound booths, so I can isolate guitar amps. And then in the basement we can rehearse.”

“It’s beautiful,” guitarist Jose Mostajo says. “From the day we got here, we just had the camera out. Just looking out the balcony, you’ve got mountains and trees everywhere. In L.A., you forget — you have the beach, but after that, you just have city, city, city.”

With monkish discipline and a steady diet of cheap food, “We put our nose to the grindstone and wrote, produced and mixed an album by ourselves of 10 original songs and … launched our completely independent band, King The Kid, in around two months,” they wrote in their initial email to The Bulletin announcing their presence and the release of their debut album, “Start Something.”

And it’s true. With a strong social media presence and access to all the equipment they need to record an album themselves, King the Kid is using 21st-century means to go it alone, without the assistance of a record label.

Tomorrow, the three — bassist and lead vocalist Frank, 22; drummer Ricky Ficarelli, 19; and guitarist Mostajo, 23 — will play their first live show as King the Kid at Seattle’s El Corazon. They are one of several bands on the bill for the all-ages show.

Last week, The Bulletin sat down to learn more about the band with big hair, big pop-punk hooks and big ambitions. Their close quarters have rendered them able to finish each other’s sentences, and their music skills — all three are multi-instrumentalists — make them capable of playing one another’s parts on their small but growing number of songs.

Ficarelli, originally from South Florida, says he was a “big band nerd” during his school days. He moved to Los Angeles in 2011 at age 17 to pursue music and finished high school online.

“My parents were really awesome and supportive. I was like, ‘I want to chase the dream,’ and they let me chase the dream,” he says.

Frank and Mostajo arrived in Los Angeles not long after Ficarelli. Mostajo, who’s from Peru by way of Atlanta, headed that way after completing his studies at the University of Georgia. Frank hails from Seattle and attended the University of Oregon.

Birth of The Kid

Upon arriving in Los Angeles. “I met tons of musically talented young people,” Frank says. “Jose was sort of one out of this giant crew of people that I started collaborating with, but right when I met Jose, it was instant jam success. It was like, ‘OK, we can both play guitar in a complementary way.’ So it just turned into us all jamming.”

Adds Ficarelli, “Me and David met, and David was friends with Jose. We were just in the mood to jam one night, just kind of for fun … and we needed another guitar player, so David called Jose. And that’s really how we met.” Over the course of a year, the three played both together and separately with other acts.

“It was pretty much a year of finding out who we are, and then we moved here to really get started,” Ficarelli says. The three settled on King the Kid — a name, they say, that’s meant to be something of a statement of purpose or independence.

“The name is kind of all about … being independent and, even if you’re young, taking life into your own hands,” Ficarelli says.

“A lot of our fan base is young people trying to figure out who they are as they go through life issues and problems, good things, bad things,” says Frank. “We are sort of role models in a way for taking life into your own hands.”

They came to Bend to record because, Frank says, “I went to University of Oregon and I was familiar with Bend because I love snowboarding. My parents ended up buying property here … and they were kind enough to let us stay here and pay rent.”

“Bend is good because we can really focus, which is why we came here rather than stay in Los Angeles. We had no distractions. It was literally the three of us,” he says.

Social media presence

Now, there’s no publicist to call. No manager. No label. King the Kid are doing all of this themselves, their eyes set firmly on the future.

“But because we’re such a new band, we don’t have the credibility (with) booking agents to prove to them we have fans,” Frank says. What they do have going for themselves is “a dedicated fan base,” he says.

The band’s YouTube presence and ability to network via social media can’t be overstated.

From the day they left Los Angeles, the group has posted on their YouTube channel a series of 8- to 15-minute video diaries of their adventures. While they haven’t exactly gone viral, two of the videos have been viewed more than 8,000 times.

“By interacting through all the social media, we’re able to develop and empower our fans,” explains Frank, who studied business and entrepreneurship at Oregon. “None of us said anything about going out this morning (to be interviewed), but they pretty much know where we are at all times. The term is ‘fandom,’ and we’re creating a fandom that’s united.”

“We really, really go out of our way to try and reply to everybody,” Ficarelli says. “If I’m going through my Twitter feed and I see someone I’ve never replied to before, (I) reply to that person. You make every person feel like they’re important. We’re such a small band, yet our fans are so awesome because — whether it’s replying to every single Facebook wall post or going through your tweets 24 hours a day, or replying to Tumblr messages — we really go out of our way to make everyone feel important.”

First single

On Dec. 15, they released their first single, “We Are the Ones.” There are scenes of Smith Rock and snippets of Deschutes National Forest blanketed in snow in their video for the song, a pop-punk earworm worthy of Blink-182, one of their musical heroes.

When a viewer commented “Who are you guys??” the band’s official reply was this: “King The Kid. Composed of Ricky, David and Jose. David wears colorful pants, Ricky is like a teddy bear, and Jose is Peruvian.”

“It’s obviously rare” for an act to have such a dialog with fans via Youtube, Ficarelli says. “Why not? It takes two seconds, and you make someone’s day.”

Following tomorrow’s show in Seattle, they’ll play an unplugged set broadcast live at noon Feb. 16 on StageIt.com. On March 1, they’ll embark on a cross-country living room tour, playing acoustic shows for the fans they’ve cultivated through social media.

Going on tour

“Our fans are coming into another fan’s home, which is very cool, and we’re playing 32 cities. We’re going to be out for two months, and we’re going over 10,000 miles in my Toyota,” Frank says. Their destination is Orlando, where they’re scheduled to perform at Playlist Live, in late March.

“It’s a big convention for a lot of YouTube-based talent,” Ficarelli says. “It’s going to be awesome, because that will (draw) thousands of people.”

They hope the tour will unite the discreet fans they’ve made headway with through social media, and gain them credibility in the eyes of booking agents.

“Hopefully, we come back,” Ficarelli says. “It’s a chill vibe.” But he wouldn’t mind staying on the road forever.

“I want to be somebody that stays for a while,” says Mostajo. “You want to push and be relevant. I don’t want to make a splash and disappear.”

“The rest of my life, I would like to make an album, tour and then chill somewhere nice like this,” Ficarelli says.