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It's likely the kids taking fiddle lessons over at Music Row of Maryville never knew what hit them.

One minute, they were probably tentatively drawing a frayed bow across violin strings, and the next they were staring in wide-eyed wonder at the wall separating their classroom from the studio next door, from which the sound of churning guitars and thundering drums erupted.

The rock 'n' roll would have been courtesy of the Diacon-Panthers, a four-piece indie rock band that will celebrate the release of "Ride Again," a five-song EP recorded at Music Row Studio in the complex on East Lamar Alexander Parkway. According to singer-guitarist Natan Diacon-Furtado, the process made for some interesting scenarios with the normally staid bluegrass scene at Music Row.

"One thing about it was that the process was time-sensitive because of the bluegrass shows they have there at night," Diacon-Furtado told The Daily Times this week. "We had to be in and out during the day, so we would drive up there in the morning, record up until lunch, then come back and record until 5 so we could get everything out and they could have a bluegrass show.

"The other thing they have there is music lessons, and sometimes we felt bad because a kid would be learning the fiddle and we'd be playing the loudest part of one of the new songs. So we would take a break to let the class end. It was all really great, though. Different things about recording there would take us out of our mindset a little bit."

Tonight, the Diacon-Panthers will celebrate the release of "Ride Again" with a show at The Pilot Light in Knoxville's Old City. It caps a week-long promotional tour for the band, which has to limit its performances because of geographic restrictions on the members.

Diacon-Furtado and his bandmates -- guitarist Greg Given (who attends Reed College in Portland, Ore., with Diacon-Furtado), bassist/pianist Jeremy Given (a student of Berklee College of Music in Boston) and drummer Charlie Henschen (an undergraduate at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt.) -- were in high school when they first put together the group. They had no intention of putting their secondary educations on the back burner, but neither did they want to give up what they were passionate about, either.

And with summer and winter breaks giving them an opportunity to reunite in their hometown, Knoxville seemed like a logical base of operations, Diacon-Furtado added. Last year, the band released "Make It Feel Better," a full-length album, and while following it up became a slow process, the opportunity to record at Music Row was too good to pass up, he said.

"After 'Make It Feel Better' came out, Greg and I went back to Portland, and I was sitting around writing really slowly," he said. "I think you can tell -- the songs have a lot less parts to them. But Scott (Rader, who runs Music Row Studio) is a family friend, and he called and wanted to bring us in to get everything going and test the studio out."

The album charges out of the gate with the plodding rock feel of "Curses," a behemoth of a song that combines the band's signature indie-meets-Southern-rock sound with bits of drone and psychedelia. But then the EP gets introspective, with the ensuing songs drifting in and out of daydream-style instrumental intricacy back to full-on rock.

"For some reason, writing these songs took a lot longer," Diacon-Furtado said. "I was just caught up in school and relationships, and it just got progressively more and more at me looking at one or two lines I'd written, over and over and over again. It was almost like we had so much time, I became almost compulsive at looking at really miniscule parts of the song, kind of like an obsession.

"There aren't many songs, and none of them are very long, so the obsession turned into what every fragment and segment was going to sound like. There would be months where I would have a line of the song done, and every day I'd play that line 10 or 15 times. Another day, I'd have another line that would work well with it, but then there would just be that line."

Once in the studio, Rader provided the impetus to finish the songs, while Diacon-Furtado's three bandmates -- who have honed their chemistry for the past eight years, before the formation of the Diacon-Panthers even -- took Diacon-Furtado's ideas and added their own touches to them.

"They're pretty used to having me come along and say, 'This is a song,' and then they all spend the day working on it and come out with something," he said. "There's just a real familiarity there. The nicest thing is being able to go into Scott's studio and know how everybody else is going to play, and play to those strengths, which is probably why it sounds cooler when we play something a little different."

Will the Panthers be back to Music Row? It's likely, Diacon-Furtado said. They're going their separate ways after tonight's show, but the band itself will remain ready to rise again when the members return to East Tennessee. And Music Row, he added, would be an ideal spot to cut another record.

"I think we'd all love to," he said. "I think the new record shows how great the studio is."