Sometimes a small taste of something isn't enough to reveal all of its flavours. Such is the case with Hellogoodbye. The Huntington Beach, California–based band's debut album, Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs! veers from mandolin-driven Tin Pan Alley balladry ("Oh, It Is Love") to Vocoder-topped robot-dance synth-rock ("Touchdown Turnaround"), with plenty of stops in between.

"I think that's a good thing," Hellogoodbye's singer-guitarist and main songwriter Forrest Kline says when the Straight calls him at home in the O.C. "I like bands like that. If there's a band that I like, it's like, 'Oh, you've got to hear this band–but I've got to show you at least six songs so you get the idea.' You know?"

Hellogoodbye's versatility has served it well: earlier this year, the Postal Service–lite pop of "Here (in Your Arms)" reached the upper echelons of Billboard's singles chart, and the punkishly propulsive "Figures A and B (Means You and Me)" surely won a few new fans for the band when it crossed North America with the Warped Tour last summer.

"It was a lot better than I thought," Kline says of the experience. "The whole tour was a lot more fun than I had anticipated. Not that I had anticipated it would be horrible, but I had always heard horror stories that it was just really difficult, and we'd be exposed to people who were fans of bands that probably wouldn't be fans of us. But we never really had any kind of crazy jocks or punks or anything that came over and told us to shut up. I guess only people that liked us came and watched us play. Or we just had so many people watching us that liked us that it just completely stomped out everybody else and crushed them by sheer force."

Maybe the Warped kids were swayed by Hello ­goodbye's lyrics, which deal with the sort of crappy romantic experiences to which anyone who has ever been young and punch-drunk with love can relate. As Kline sings on "I Saw It on Your Keyboard": "There exists a melody/That just might change your mind/If only I knew the key/To sing to make you mine".

Kline says that his seemingly universal songs are all strictly autobiographical; they're about real people and real relationships he has had, some of them dating back to his high-school days. As such, he admits that it sometimes feels a bit weird to kiss and tell in song form, but he doesn't seem to have many regrets about his indiscretion.

"Some of the songs from the record that are older, they were mostly written intended for nobody–not even the person that they were about–to ever hear," he says. "But I don't even speak to any of those people anymore, so I don't know what any of them think. They probably think I'm a big creep, but I would never know."

Hellogoodbye plays the Croatian Cultural Centre on Tuesday (April 10).