The music-biz landscape has changed radically over the past half-decade, and no one is more aware of that than the members of Bath, England’s the Heavy. Forget radio airplay, heavy rotation on MTV, or a Rolling Stone cover story: these days careers are made through new channels.

Build a buzz on YouTube, place your songs in TV shows, or score a high-profile ad campaign, and you may find your days of grinding it out in dive bars to 20 people (including the doorman) are instantly over.

That approach to business has certainly worked for the Heavy. The world first got to know the quartet as the band that blew away David Letterman with a 2010 live performance of the turbo-soul number “How You Like Me Now?”. (Gushing after the song’s conclusion, Letterman demanded an unheard-of Late Show With David Letterman encore, telling the group, “Do it again—just a little more. Go again, go again!” The clip would go viral on YouTube.) Since then, the Heavy’s songs have popped up everywhere from Entourage to EA’s NHL 13 to the trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s ode to Old-West violence, The Hateful Eight.

Reached at a Los Angeles tour stop, drummer Chris Ellul cites such exposure as a big reason he has a thriving career with the Heavy, which has just released its fourth album, Hurt & the Merciless.

“All that stuff is the key to us still being here today,” the affable timekeeper says, speaking on his cellphone. “Without those avenues, things maybe would have been different. I’d imagine that we would have struggled to keep going.”

Instead, Ellul reports that he’s not only loving returning to the road with the Heavy, but convinced his band—which includes singer Kelvin Swaby, guitarist Daniel Taylor, and bassist Spencer Page—has made its best record yet.

“All the TV and placement stuff is just ego,” the drummer argues. “What makes me really proud is when I can sit back and listen to something and be really proud of it. To hear something in a film and go, ‘That sounds really good’—to not question it and know that it’s good—those are the moments that make it for me. In the past I’ll hear something like ‘How You Like Me Now?’ and think, ‘That could have been mixed better.’ This is probably the first record that we’ve done where I can listen to it and I don’t hear any little faults.”

Of course, every musician is supposed to say that when a tape recorder is rolling, but Ellul has good reason to be excited about Hurt & the Merciless. Long known for its full-throttle live show, the band indeed seems to have locked on to something this time out, with the songs rocketing from Motown at its most raw and bombastic (“Since You Been Gone”) to spirit-of-’76 punk (“Slave to Your Love”) to call-and-response swing (“A Ghost You Can’t Forget”).

Either unwilling or unable to stick to one musical template, the Heavy sounds as stoked tackling Cinemascope Tex-Mex on “Nobody’s Hero” as it does bridging Muscle Shoals and classic ’60s Nashville on “Goodbye Baby”. Throughout the album, Ellul puts on a clinic behind the kit. (Check out the jungle-thump brilliance of “What Happened to the Love?”.)

That Hurt & the Merciless is being hailed as a bright and shining return for the Heavy is only appropriate. Ellul reveals that there were some dark days after the release of the group’s last effort, 2012’s The Glorious Dead. Those days would provide plenty of inspiration for lyrics like “Don’t call me baby/That’s not my name” from the blaxploitation-soul workout “Not the One”.

“In the time since the last record, Kel’s been married and divorced,” the drummer says. “Songs like ‘Since You Been Gone’ and ‘What Happened to the Love?’ are outpourings of what was going on in Kel’s personal life.”

Musically, there’s also a new self-assuredness that wasn’t always there on past records.

“I think, certainly with this record, we knew what we were doing and what we had to do,” Ellul says. “We just had to figure out how to get there. And it never felt like we got lost when we were making the album.”

Making that doubly gratifying are the times Ellul and his bandmates wondered if things were going to happen for them. Everyone in the group had been doing music long before they came together as the Heavy, with Swaby, for example, involved in Bristol trip-hop unit Alpha and then working the club-DJ circuit.

“For me, I’ve been in a lot of bands, and there’s always been an elephant in the room,” Ellul says. “There’s this scenario where most of the band wants to be, say, the Beatles, and then one guy who thinks he’s Eddie Van Halen. This is probably the first time where, straightaway, there was a magic that I never experienced playing with other bands. It’s not about technical proficiency or anything like that. It’s purely about the soul. Or the heart. I’d been in a lot of bands and worked in a lot of studios right before I joined the Heavy, and I was starting to hate music because of never finding that jell. When you find it, you really do know.”

And you also know when things finally take off and lead to the kind of opportunities that have kept the Heavy afloat.

“There are loads of little moments, like getting a gold disc,” Ellul says. “The obvious thing was when we did Letterman for the first time. None of us really knew what it was at the time, but you look back and in hindsight realize, ‘Wow—that really was a really big deal.’ ”

The Heavy plays the Commodore Ballroom on Monday (May 2).