In 2005, Boys Night Out released the magnificently depressing concept album Trainwreck. Built around the story of a man who wakes up to discover he's killed his wife in his sleep, it logs his obsessive pursuit of a "perfect song" that will somehow ease his torment, until he eventually dies.

Trainwreck reflected its protagonist's fractured psyche with finicky arrangements and an oppressive absence of hummable melodies. It also allowed the Burlington, Ontario, quintet to define itself away from the more prosaic screamo of its 2003 debut, Make Yourself Sick. Sadly, such ambition didn't come without a price. As guitarist Jeff Davis explains, calling from his tour van somewhere in Pomona, California, "There was a huge backlash. People were calling us faggots, and saying, 'Where's the screaming?'"

There's even less screaming on the band's newest, self-titled effort, which was released in June. "It's chorus-based, hookier, straightforward rock," notes Davis of sing-along numbers like "Fall for the Drinker" and the soaring "Get Your Head Straight". "So even people that were into Trainwreck aren't down with this one," he says.

There's something to be said for the band's refusal to play to the gallery. As Davis readily confesses, when Boys Night Out made an impact with that first album–which was naturally adored by the same gloomy, crisis-addicted generation that was concurrently making stars out of Alexisonfire–the band itself was miserable.

"We toured it to death," he sighs, "and we were starving for change. When we put out Trainwreck, we knew we were going to lose a good portion of that fan base. We also knew that the people who can get behind a band looking to not put the same record out over and over again, those were the fans we wanted to keep."

As for the clowns who called Boys Night Out "faggots", Davis dismisses them with a curt, "I wouldn't even want people like that listening to us in the first place."

Ironically, there are abundant traces of BNO's screamo/post-hardcore DNA in the new album despite its lighter tone. It's there in the harmonized riffs and polyrhythms of "Heirs of Error", the choppy dynamics of "Hey, Thanks", and a governing sense of dread that tends, lyrically speaking, to make an apocalypse out of just about everything, whether it's a breakup in "Push and Pull" or the "mistakes that keep me company" in the single "Up With Me". Davis nevertheless points to the latter as further evidence of the band's relatively sunnier outlook. As he puts it, much of Boys Night Out is about "becoming better people".

"This record has a lot to do with redemption, second chances, and change," says the guitarist. "It's dealing with the same themes as the past but there's another side to it."

Davis anticipates that his band will continue to explore the other sides of things, but for now, he's not entirely sure what we should expect next. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's a reaction to the record we just put out," he muses, "but I think it's gonna end up being pretty different, and pretty weird. But who knows?"

Boys Night Out plays the Plaza on Sunday (September 23).