Mining the Eighties for synthy dance beats to fuse with darker alternative rock leanings seems so natural this year that it's easy to forget just how alien the Faint sounded when they did just that with Blank-Wave Arcade five years ago. Even Danse Macabre, released in 2001, raced ahead of the chic curve that exploded this year with albums by the Killers, Franz Ferdinand and others. But the Faint's new set, Wet From Birth, due September 14th on Saddle Creek, will enter this world to find that listeners have finally caught up with the Omaha band.

"It does seem like there's more types of music that sounds like what we do than there was when we put out any of our other records," says frontman Todd Baechle. "But with this one, I feel like we've moved ahead ourselves from what we had been doing. Danse Macabre was a long time ago for us, and I think we wanted to make a different-sounding record. Back then we were just starting to learn how to program keyboard sounds. We were trying to make songs that didn't really fit into any particular genre. I think we were trying to take the final step out of indie rock with Danse Macabre."

The Faint's next step is a fuller sound on Wet From Birth. The group has gotten a bit symphonic, adding some strings to "Desperate Guys" and "Southern Belles in London." "On 'Desperate Guys' we had this Paganini sample," Baechle says. "We were gonna try to clear the sample, but it just seemed like if we could get somebody to play it, it would sound better." The latter is a song Baechle wrote for fiance Orenda Fink of Azure Ray while they were separated due to touring commitments, and he says several songs similarly spring from the lives of those around him. The album's final track, "Birth," was the first song he wrote for the album, the result of a visit to Thailand to recharge. "I tried to seek out the most secluded island there that I could and just think about my life," he says. "That song came to me first, it's about experiencing birth as if you knew what was going on, like a tourist almost. It's a song about myself, [laughs], yet another song about myself."

Baechle says of the fairly self-explanatory "Paranoia Attack," "We wrote that during The Scare. You know, 'Everybody go to the store and get gas masks and canned food and take it to the shelter with the bottled water.' I just think it's weird when we rely on the media to tell us when to be scared or not."

Other songs make use of more, um, organic and less electronic instrumentation, namely "I Disappear," which finds an unlikely percussion tandem in a discarded muffler and a raccoon penis bone. "There was a sound I wanted to get and I didn't know how to do it," Baechle says. "I had the bone for no apparent reason, certainly not as an instrument, but hey, it turned out handy. We probably could've found a better piece of metal, old mufflers are kind of soft. But it worked."

Some of the inspiration for change might have come from the band's rehearsal spaces, an upgrade provided by Danse's success. Baechle says that the group practiced material for its previous record in his basement. "It was such a small room that Joel [bassist Peterson] and [guitarist] Dapose had to stand in certain places between the rafters so they wouldn't hit their heads." For Wet, the Faint worked out the songs in the Orifice, a warehouse that was initially filled with discarded washing machines. "It was full of them when we rented it," he continues. "They were stacked on top of each other, so we had no idea what the floor looked like when we rented it. But it's void of that stuff now, because we made a huge wreck of a mess while shooting a video there. Now there's piles of dolls and snakes and religious crap, shrunken heads and Day of the Dead Mexican stuff. There's a lot of feathers."