The venue was intimate, the crowd merely ample. But for a Thursday evening at the Rock and Roll Hotel in Northeast Washington D.C., New York indie hip-hop trio Northern State delivered a high-energy, party-starting one-hour set to a responsive crowd that bounced along every step of the way.

“We’re going to get a little bit Destiny’s Child in here,” Julie “Hesta Prynn” Potash said, jokingly introducing a song.

“But we need more glittery outfits for that,” Robyn “Sprout” Goodmark retorted, pretending to model in her white tank top and black slacks.

Meanwhile, Correne “Spero” Spero — comfortably attired in jeans, a wide pink belt, and a baby blue T-shirt emblazoned with a rainbow and a unicorn — lined up a bassline on a keyboard as Northern State’s backing drummer, Seth Johnson, and guitarist, Kaite Cassidy, waited to ease into the song.

“We at least need some shiny lotion — and better choreography,” Ms. Spero offered, just before a slinky beat and a burst of guitar announced “Iluvitwhenya,” a sassy piece of R&B bump-and-grind as devised by three women who love rap as indie-rock.

The song appears on the trio’s third album, “Can I Keep This Pen?” which comes out today on Ipecac. (The group will make an in-store appearance at the Union Square Virgin Megastore today before its official record-release show tomorrow night at the Luna Lounge in Williamsburg.) It’s a surprisingly pop-friendly album from the seven-year old band with the small but cultish following, and it arrives at a time when very little popular music is made by and for women just like the ones in this most unusual of hiphop acts.

Upstairs in the backstage dressing room an hour before going on stage, Ms. Spero sits down to “stuff her face” and talk about her band. A table in the center of the room is covered with baskets of pita bread and hummus, olives, grilled panini, and other heart-healthy snacks. During the next 45 minutes, Ms. Goodmark and Ms. Potash drift in and out of the room to eat and chat, along with Mr. Johnson, Ms. Cassidy, and show opener Jenny Owens Young, who will later close her set with a rocking cover of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” accompanied only by her acoustic guitar.

Everybody fires off jokes and witty rejoinders, reminiscences, tangential observations, or just plain wild-hair digressions. In a very short time, the three women recall driving around in a Lexus and trying out luxurious personas, reveal a desire to tackle Stevie Nicks’s “Gypsy” at karaoke, and laugh at selling their Day-Glo colored t-shirts at a Swedish music festival where all the other tshirts were doom-metal black. The convivial mood is admittedly the bunker mentality of people who just endured a nine-hour drive from Boston together, but it’s also the easygoing confidence of a band that has survived the oftencareer-killingdisappointment of a major-label album that was practically ignored.

In 2003, Columbia Records released Northern State’s sincerely hip-hop “All City,” but in the leadup to the album, regional and national press treated the band almost as a novelty act. Most stories focused on the members’ backgrounds as white, college-educated young women from suburban Long Island; reducing the band to the “female Beastie Boys” was inevitable.

“[Columbia was] really into us until it was time to actually release the album, and then they really dropped the ball,” Ms. Spero said. “It’s kind of confusing to us exactly what happened, but it isn’t that shocking because we’ve heard so many horror stories of bands like us getting lost in a big majorlabel situation. We knew that going into it, but we were also at a crossroads with our band, especially financially. We were in debt. We were freaking out. We didn’t know if we were going to be able to continue to do it.”

Northern State had aimed high with “All City.” The trio recorded with rap royalty such as the Roots’ Questlove, Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs, and Pete Rock. The result was a cheeky flash of sassy, girlpositive hip-hop with a healthy fun streak. Columbia didn’t know how to market it.

“Sony and BMG were merging and people were getting laid off,” Ms. Spero said. “Every time you call you can’t get the same person on the phone. It was a rough time for major labels in general. And we’re the new band. So who’s going to be the person who is really ready to go out on a limb for the three girls from Long Island who rap? Nobody.”

For six months the band toured modestly in major-label limbo before finally realizing it wasn’t a good fit and deciding to leave Columbia.

“I think that was the best decision we ever made, because then we could finally stop wasting out energy on something that wasn’t productive and start moving forward,” Ms. Spero said. “And the minute we did that we all started to feel a lot better. And that’s when we finally started writing and recording again, and that’s how this album got started.”

Northern State financed and recorded “Can I Keep This Pen?” independently during that latter half of 2004 and up through the fall of 2006. Working with their backing band, the Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock, and and producer Chuck Brody Ms. Spero, Ms. Potack, and Ms. Goodmark decided to try whatever idea they came up with “because all bets are off,” as Ms. Spero put it. “There was no label, there was nobody expecting it to be delivered. Nobody cared.”

What they came up with is a refreshingly playful slice of hip-hopinflected indie-pop. The straightahead if cheeky hip-hop tracks remain, such as the infectiously funny poseur bashing “Sucka Mofo” and the leadoff track, “Mic Tester.” But the band also convincingly tackles winsome down-tempo pop (“Fall Apart”), summery trip-hop (“Run Off the Road”), and dance-floor ready indie-pop, such as “Cold War” and the bouncy “Better Already,” whose You-Tube.com video — featuring the band making stuffed animals dance and lip-synch — is a stroke of no-tech brilliance.

Throughout, the three bandmates sing about being late 20-something, early 30-something women trying to make a living in New York, throwing in serious and comical allusions that run from the Pet Shop Boys to Miguel Cervantes, and always politically aware while never forgetting to bring the fun. In the end, “Can I Keep this Pen?” is an album of smart, adult women having fun making music — and with so little pop music speaking to such women, where’s the bad in that?

“I think people aren’t always aware of the fact that bands that self-manage are really hard workers,” Ms. Spero said. “And especially with girls, I don’t think people expect that from girls. But that’s us. We are three overachieving, hardworking women. We have been self-managing this band pretty well for seven years. While having all the fun that we have, we take it very seriously.”