A pewter plaque outside the back door of Shins keyboardist Marty Crandall's Portland, Oregon, home explains that the two-story residence, known as the Alfred J. Armstrong House, was built in 1894 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Inside, the living room appears immaculately preserved -- gilded molding, an ornate mahogany fireplace, gold orchids stenciled onto muted green walls. It could double as a museum exhibit on Queen Anne-style homes if it weren't for the fifty-inch flat-screen TV flashing the words objective failed: proof that Crandall has a way to go before mastering his new video game, Gears of War. "They shoot you with these little arrows, and if they get you, your whole body explodes," he says before an enemy combatant blows him to bits.

The band has gathered at Crandall's place to rehearse for a handful of dates that will kick off its new album, Wincing the Night Away. Drummer Jesse Sandoval is running late after suffering from carne asada-induced food poisoning last night. While they wait, Crandall, frontman James Mercer, bassist Dave Hernandez, 36, and multi-instrumentalist Eric Johnson, 30, clumsily jam on the Doobie Brothers' "Long Train Runnin'." Once Sandoval arrives, pasty and exhausted, Crandall passes out cans of Miller Lite, and the Shins get down to business.

The five band members stand in a circle, facing one another, yet there is never any question who's running the show: Mercer, who formed the band in 1999 while its members still lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, directs all the action, advising his bandmates how many la-la-las to sing or what keyboard sound to use. He delivers his instructions gently, but clearly even the tiniest detail matters. A self-described control freak, Mercer, 36, writes all of the Shins' material, and for Wincing, he recorded a great deal on his own before bringing in the others.

His obsessiveness paid off: Wincing the Night Away demonstrates that there's an art to making pop songs that sound at once off-kilter and precisely manicured. Picking up the threads from buoyant girl groups, spaghetti-western themes, Eighties British New Wave and Sixties baroque psychedelia, songs such as "Turn On Me," "Phantom Limb" and "Australia" offer a twenty-first-century pastiche that could belong to no one else but the Shins. The band has combined sales of more than a million copies for its two previous albums, both released by Seattle indie label Sub Pop. With Wincing, the Shins are poised to become the company's best-selling artist since Nirvana released Bleach eighteen years ago.

"When we got signed, I remember [Sub Pop co-founder] Jonathan Poneman telling me that he felt very confident that we could eventually sell 20,000 albums," Mercer told me over brunch at a spot around the corner from his own hundred-year-old house. "Twenty thousand albums? That meant we stood to earn $20,000, which would have been a life-changing thing."

It was good timing for their first big break. Mercer had never finished his degree in chemistry at the University of New Mexico, he was about to turn thirty, and he'd quit his job and was living off his credit cards. "I had a conversation with my parents where I said, 'Look, I'm going to make this one last push at music,' " he says. "I told them, 'If this doesn't work, I'll go back to school.'"