About halfway through Very Emergency, the Promise Ring's new album, there sits a declaration that "things are just getting good." The line, like so many of rock and roll's more meaningful double entendres, could go a long way in describing the existence of the Milwaukee band itself.

After five years of playing tiny house shows, touring in broken-down vans, selling 7-inches to eat and borrowing "a thousand dollars from my parents to pay my bills for the next six months," as guitarist Jason Gnewikow puts it, the Promise Ring has hit a certain strain of the big time.

But it's not that simple, is it? It's a complicated thing, the ascension of the proverbial underground A-list to the lower echelons of the major leagues, and the Promise Ring's faced no fewer challenges than any other band on the way there. Cries of "sellout" have, of course, been ringing in the band's collective ear practically since day one, and they've only increased in volume as record sales have grown in number.

Additionally, the band has had to deal with its position in the Great Emo Stakes of the late '90s, a battlefield complete with a personal rumor mill and casualty count. Needless to say, it's been anything but a walk in the park.

Yet Very Emergency is the Promise Ring's most upbeat work yet, a collection of 10 summery, feel-good pop songs that all but abandons the amber melancholy of 30 Degrees Everywhere and the hand-wringing, heart-tugging of Nothing Feels Good. In fact, it seems there's a whole lot to feel good about these days. "This record I'm proud of," singer/guitarist Davey von Bohlen sighs. "Whether it's good or bad or smart or clever, I don't care. I think it's just a record that I really enjoyed making."

Gnewikow agrees. "This record is way more of an accomplishment for me, because it turned out exactly the way I wanted it to. Every step of the way, I think we accomplished what we set out to," he says.

Which, if the band is correct, appears to be a simpler record than any it's made yet. "The ironic thing about it is that, yeah, the songs are totally a lot more simple," Gnewikow admits. "I mean, it's obvious."

The guitarist chalks the transition up to the Ring finally finding their own distinct voice, amongst both the bands of their backgrounds and the bands making music alongside them today. "Our first records sounded derivative of whatever bands [we were into]," he explains. "But that's something that happens to new bands, because you're playing with new people and you're figuring out what your sound is. The first record was us trying to be a whole lot of different things."

If the band was free of that burden this time around, though, it faced a whole new one: the fact that people, both under- and above-ground, were waiting for the album. "I think that the fact that people are listening is in the background," von Bohlen insists, "because we do live in Wisconsin, which is basically Mars to most people. It doesn't seem to really matter. I mean, I can't recall a time where we were writing a record and thinking, 'This is gonna be really weird for people to hear,' you know?"

"I don't know if it had that much of an effect on the outcome," Gnewikow concurs, "but it was definitely in the back of our brain. It's always that thing, like, if you have a record that anybody pays attention to, then the next time you have a record, everybody compares it to that record. It's like you can't get away from it."

It's especially hard to get away from when the "it" is emo. For all its talk of lines in Tennessee and hearts skipping beats, Very Emergency's got a lot more to do with Sugar than Sunny Day Real Estate. It's certainly not the ultimate emo statement the media would've loved it to have been, and the album's better for it.

"I feel like if it was another place and time and it was the same record, it would be thought of kind of differently," Gnewikow says. "Say this was an early '90s record; people'd be like, "It's grunge!" he laughs. "But you can't really escape it. There are trends that go on in music and you get sucked in to that. It's like a black hole."

"It's the curse of being in a band," von Bohlen adds. "People have to talk about you, so you're gonna get slapped with a label. It doesn't bother me at all; it's totally inevitable, you know?"

The handle's clumsiness is particularly vexing to the two. "Would I prefer not to be labeled?" Gnewikow asks. "Sure, but if it wasn't this, it'd probably be some other thing. How vaguely can you put it? We're an independent pop-rock band."

"Didn't Lita Ford do that duet with Ozzy Osbourne?" von Bohlen wonders. 'Close My Eyes Forever'? Now that's emo. That's the whole thing: It's such a weird term I just can't imagine knowing how to use it in conversation. Take 'hard rock.' Is Lita Ford hard rock or is she just not hard enough?"

But it seems that emo once actually did mean something other than quick cash-ins and snappy graphic design. "I remember the early '90s," Gnewikow reflects, "when I think that emo was still an acceptable idea -- maybe like toward the end of Hoover, like '93 or '92, when it was still a legitimate thing."

Now, however, the original intent and beauty of those three little letters has gotten lost in a sea of corporate interest and scene backlash. "It sounds harsh, but what it's about is bullshit," Gnewikow clarifies.

Von Bohlen agrees. "Most of these so-called 'emo' bands, in our experience, are just bad musicians trying to be good musicians and not doing such a good job. I mean, that certainly does explain us, and we've gotten better.

"Whatever emo is I'm not even sure, but it seems to be based on terrible songwriting, changes that make no sense at all and out-of-tune, out-of-key everything. It's a music that is at fault. And we want to be not faulted," he says.

"It becoming a major-label thing is what cheapens it," Gnewikow adds. "It's definitely a lot more respectable if it's the underground talking about the underground. But now it's a term used by journalists that are defining something that they don't know anything about."

The boys in the band, though, aren't worrying too much about it. "We're just doing this," Gnewikow explains. "It's right now and it's really fun and it's totally rewarding. We've gotten to do crazy things I would've never in a million years thought we'd be able to do. And that's awesome."

The answer, it seems, is again lurking within Very Emergency's typically playful word games: "I've got my body and my mind on the same page," von Bohlen sings. "And happiness is all the rage."