The opening track from Rainer Maria’s next album, due out at the beginning of April, shows off a band who has apparently done its best to smooth out all the rough edges. Once enamoured with shrieking compression effects and emopunk vocals (back when “emo” wasn’t just another way to say “goth wuss”), Caithlin De Marrais, Kyle Fischer and William Kuehn have taken a bit of a winding journey to get to the middle-of-the-road college rock of Catastrophe Keeps Us Together. Each album has represented subtle but definite stylistic shifts, from the muddled garage emo of their debut EP and Past Worn Searching to the gauzy atmospherics of A Better Version Of Me. De Marrais’s tentative role as lead singer on Look Now Look Again became permanent by the time of Long Knives Drawn. The band’s switched cities (goodbye Madison, hello NYC) and labels (ditto Polyvinyl for Grunion), and the two principal songwriters broke up. A mass of solo and side projects ensued, and for a couple of years RM toured the northeastern U.S. sporadically, as if to remind everyone that they hadn’t yet disappeared.

Catastrophe Keeps Us Together was promised last spring, but obviously failed to materialize. Considering the environment in which Long Knives Drawn was born (critics called the Rainer Maria album and Ficher’s solo album two sides of the breakup coin), it was a bit surprising to hear there was going to be another album at all; the live album/DVD that chronicled their many onstage performances would’ve been a great swan song. But here we are, three years later, and the gang is not only still playing together, but have decided to make Rainer Maria their priority “for the foreseeable future.” Their recent show at SXSW impressed, but there’s still the question of exactly what changes Rainer Maria have in store for the record. Early signs indicate that perhaps the more aggressive cuts off Long Knives Drawn were a last gasp of energy rather than a renewed attack. And while it’s great that the band has seen fit to “mature” and “develop,” let’s hope they haven’t forgotten where they came from.