“Democracy’s as good as dead, don’t let them get inside your head!” wailed Willow Bennison, singer and guitarist for the band Harsh Crowd.

Behind her, the three other members of the group thrashed away animatedly onstage at South Street Seaport. It was a beautiful autumn Saturday afternoon, and several dozen onlookers had stopped to watch, including a 20-something hipster in black leather and dark sunglasses, four exuberantly leaping little girls and an older man who had climbed out of his seated walker to dance.

The girls in the band carried themselves with an unusual confidence. All four are 14-year-old native New Yorkers, but their burgeoning feminist pop-punk has already drawn attention far beyond the free show at the Taste of the Seaport Festival where they were performing on this occasion. They have been refining their sound for more than three years, appearing at the kind of New York venues likely to intimidate much more established artists: SummerStage, Joe’s Pub, Madison Square Garden. They released their first EP, “Don’t Ask Me,” in September 2015; their new EP, “Better,” is due out later this year.

After the band finished its set, Willow’s giddy mother, Emmy Gay, wearing a black Harsh Crowd T-shirt, hugged her daughter, raving about the band’s soaring cover of Radiohead’s “Creep,” a tough song to pull off. Willow rolled her eyes slightly, and her bandmates — Dea Brogaard-Thompson (guitar and vocals), Rihana Abdulrashid-Davis (bass and keyboards) and Lena Faske (drums) — looked equally blasé as they broke down their equipment.

Though their stage presence might suggest otherwise, the girls are still unmistakably ninth and 10th graders. It was visible in Willow’s fiery streaked hair and in Dea’s macramé friendship bracelets. It was visible, too, in the way the girls interlaced fingers absent-mindedly when they talked away from the concert.

But they also exhibited a maturity out of character for most 14-year-olds. They rarely interrupted one another. There was a notable dearth of giggle fits. And, ever professional, they remembered to state their names for the digital recorder each time they spoke when being interviewed.

Of course, they are not above being star-struck when meeting their heroes, like Kathleen Hanna of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, the original “riot grrrl,” at a benefit show. (“Oh, my God, I died,” Willow pealed.) But they remain largely unconcerned about meeting anyone else’s standards when it comes to their constantly evolving sound (they name MGMT, Sufjan Stevens, the Who and Joan Jett as inspirations).

“We get our influences from so many places, but when we put them all together, it becomes our own genre,” Dea said.

“It can’t be categorized,” Rihana concurred.

This diverse group came together after being matched up at Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in Brooklyn when they were 11; they had all been attending the camp separately for years beforehand. The camp, a nonprofit music-mentoring program, was started in 2004 by a small cadre of female musicians who sought to teach girls as young as 5 how to play instruments by encouraging them to collaborate in a rock band for a week.

“We knew we clicked well because we had that whole week to write a song, but we wrote ours in a day,” Lena said.

Harsh Crowd is Willie Mae Rock Camp’s longest-running musical byproduct to date, and a rarity in that its members stayed together after camp. The girls meet for three hours every Saturday to practice, with a summer hiatus for family vacations.

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