Carbondale’s Girls With Tools is fixing to play a regional music festival as the band gears up for its debut CD.

Drummer Jeff Townsend, a graduate student in English, said Girls With Tools is playing the Mississippi River Music Festival in St. Louis on Thursday. The Festival is sponsored by South By Southwest, the annual Austin, Texas music festival known for the exposure it gives to bands lucky enough to make the cut.

Townsend said he hopes a good reaction at the Mississippi River Music Festival will help the band get a spot at South By Southwest.

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We’re going to definitely submit (an application), but whether they select us or not is a different story, he said.

Townsend said Girls With Tools is in the process of mixing eight recently recorded songs that will be combined with the six songs from The Early Year, its cassette on the local Diamond Drill Music label, for the CD.

The CD, co-produced by Jim Forester and the band at Carbondale’s Molehill Studio, is due to be released in late fall. Forester said the band is holding off a tour until the disc is released.

Townsend said the group draws its influences from early 1980s punk rock.

We’re all sort of experienced punk rockers, so our attachment is to the early American punk rock like X and Blondie, he said. There’s some pop sensibility, but there’s definitely an obnoxious attitude involved.

Girls With Tools will prepare for the Mississippi River Music Festival by playing at Hangar 9 tonight at 9:45 p.m. Fellow Diamond Drill artist Crank, with whom the band shares guitarist Dave Stoecker, will open. Cover is $2.

Its Thursday St. Louis gig begins at 10 p.m. at Bernard’s, 214 Morgan St.

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