Funky yellow walls surround a living room, a crate full of vinyl records sits in the corner, and rabbit-adorned pillowcases lie across brightly colored couches. Children suddenly tear through the room — running, screaming, dancing.

It’s just another day for the members of the Awful Purdies.

“Well, it’s like this — you just asked a deep question, and we really want to answer it, but then someone’s hitting someone else, and they’re farting and needing a diaper change, and someone’s trying to maintain that depth,” banjo player Nicole Upchurch said. “It’s a give and take — labor of love. [Being in a band] is a struggle sometimes, but it’s important to us, and we love to do it.”

Awful Purdies will perform at the Mill at 5 p.m. Saturday for a CD-release party of its début self-titled album. Admission is $8.

The group formed around three years ago, when Amy Finders and Annie Savage decided to explore the possibility of a music life for the everyday woman, with kids and a career. Since then, Awful Purdies has lost and gained members — spanning an age range of 25 years — and gradually established itself in the Iowa City music community.

“I had just barely seen their first show,” Upchurch said. “I came home that night and played my banjo for three hours in the bathroom so I wouldn’t wake up my kids, and I was like, ‘I’m going to join that band.’ ”

The band members come from an eclectic scene of musical backgrounds, and they credit that as a reason for their inability to define the band’s sound.

“When I explain it to people, I just say we have a banjo player, a cello player, a harpist, an accordion, and a glockenspiel,” cello player Katie Burnes said. “We all come from different musical backgrounds. I had never experienced bluegrass or anything really in the country realm. I mean, I grew up listening to metal.”

The début album will be released this month after quite a battle and what accordion player Katie Roche calls a miracle.

“We had three babies in the course of a year and a half and managed to still self-produce an album,” she said. “A lot of that credit goes to Katie [Burnes]’s husband, Tucker Burnes, who mastered the album, and Marcy Rosenbaum’s mother, who unfortunately passed away this past summer. She funded a large portion of the money that made this album possible.”

On the album, the group adopts different personas and a variety of themes, ranging from political to personal. Each member not only contributes to each song vocally but also to the writing. Upchurch said she looks to daily life for inspiration when she creates.

“There’s a quote that I really like that talks about [seeking] something outside your daily life, it’s like brushing aside waves to look for water,” she said.

Roche explores collage songwriting, pulling lyrics from her personal journal entries. She continually has thoughts brewing in her head, and no matter what she’s doing, she said, she’s always writing.

As an all-woman band, Awful Purdies sometimes feels pressure to adhere to feminist themes, and even though the members agree with those ideas, they don’t want to remain trapped in that stereotype.

“We do encourage the idea of women getting together, and mothers coming out and still doing their passions, even when they don’t have time for it,” Upchurch said. “However, I don’t want to get stuck in that. For example, there’s not a person who could listen to ‘Homesick Birds’ and not feel like her or his voice was represented.”