His singing voice is about as calm as a machine-gun burst, but in conversation, Steve Bays of Hot Hot Heat is thoughtful, measured, even quiet. He spoke with me recently from Chicago, where the band is in the midst of touring to drum up interest in its forthcoming album, “Elevator,” out April 5.

A lot has changed since Hot Hot Heat burst onto the scene in 2002.Then Bays and company were the leading edge of the dance-rock craze, introducing the new-old sound that bands like the Killers and Franz Ferdinand have popularized in the last year. “When we started out, there wasn’t much on radio like us,” says Bays. “It was kind of a challenge. It was hard for people to categorize us, which, unfortunately, is a big part of understanding a band. There is a category for us now.”

The band now faces the ironic task of having to distinguish itself from its more-recognized acolyte – and from itself.

To accomplish this, Hot Hot Heat has focused on the essence of its sound: the unapologetic – almost ferocious – poppiness in its music. “We wanted every second to be filled with hooks,” says Bays. “Whatever direction we went in, we wanted it to almost be a caricature of that. We wanted it to be extreme, almost obnoxious.” In describing the music, he uses words like “urgent,” “exciting,” “passionate,” and “raw.”

The result is a sound that is at once familiar and free-ranging. Whereas the first album rode a single adrenaline rush from start to finish – it was recorded in a very quick six days – the new album experiments and luxuriates more while maintaining the same manic energy. There are intros that sound like Radiohead, guitars parts that melt like the Libertines, and choruses that sound, alternately, like Tom Petty, No Doubt, and Rancid – all filtered, of course, through Bays’s yelping vocals and blurting synthesizer.

If it sounds like a hodge podge of influences, it is. “Goodnight, Goodnight,” the lead single, began as an attempt to replicate a key change in a Dexy’s Midnight Runners song, but the outcome, according to Bays, was “embarrassingly simple.” His solution was to pose to the band the challenge of combining the Beatles and OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” into a single song. The result sounds like both and neither. It sounds like Hot Hot Heat.

Beyond reclaiming the plot of genre territory they originally cultivated, the goal of “Elevator” is to get respect, to prove to doubters – and, one senses, themselves – that the success of the first album was no fluke. “I think a lot of people attributed the success we had to an aesthetic, the 80s dance new wave thing,” says Bays without any prompting. “No, it’s not the fact that it’s 80s or a retro feel or new wave or a dance craze. It’s that the songs are good.”

Like it or not, the new album is also likely to be viewed as a bellwether of sorts. Back in 2002, “Make Up The Breakdown” (SubPop) was among the first indie rock albums to explode expectations, selling well-over 200,000 copies. Since then, the Shins, Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie, and the Postal Service have all repeated that feat.

Bays chalks this up to the changes wrought by technology. “Because of the Internet, people are choosing movies and music based on what they want. People are marketing things to themselves,” he says. “It used to be that what was in your face the most you would buy.”

“Elevator,” then, will be a test of how well the new model and the old one work in combination. Hot Hot Heat is now on Warner Bros. Records – they signed the day before the release of their first album – and bands and labels alike will be looking to them to see how far major-label backing can take them.

Bays displays none of the internal conflict or self-flagellation that characterized former generations of indie artists that jumped to major labels. “The music industry is just different now,” he says. “They do their major label thing, but it doesn’t really get in the way. They let us do the album uninterrupted. We handed it in when it was done. They were excited about it. There was none of that weird major label hanky panky you hear about.”

Don’t expect to see him scrawling “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” on his t-shirts when Rolling Stone comes a calling (as Kurt Cobain famously did). But Bays isn’t above a little self-mockery. As he sings on the album’s final track: “Jingle jangle that’s the sound of / useless toys spent on useless boys and / I’m just a salesman with my suitcase in hand/ there’s a piece of land I got my eye on.”

Judging by the sound of his jingle jangle, he’ll have it and a whole lot more.

Hot Hot Heat plays the Bowery Ballroom tomorrow night (6 Delancey Street at Bowery, 212-533-2111).