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The members of Soular have been touring for most of the past two years.

When they return to their home base of Albuquerque this weekend, they'll splash their new video, and they'll have more stories to tell.

The road life has been "one of the greatest educations you can possibly have," said Marsh Shamburger, Soular's lead singer.

And this is from a guy who studied music at Baylor University, writing his senior thesis on the impact of jazz on American culture after World War II.

But he's not talking about music theory. He's on a cell phone. The band had just rolled into Dallas on Saturday afternoon after a gig the night before in Oklahoma.

We're talking more about the equivalent of an advanced degree in sociology or anthropology, gleaned from human interaction. And the new thesis could be "Love Crash Heal," the album the band released last month and which is cracking college radio airplay charts. (And earning spins on one of CBS' "CSI" episodes, as well as here and there on MTV reality shows.)

It is at times bitter, pessimistic, skeptical and scathing. And that's just in the new single, "So, This Is the Way It Feels," a hardened relationship song that sarcastically spits out, "This is the way it feels to be happy/This is the way it feels to be satisfied." It all launches from an elastic bass riff and veers into power chords and trippy organ solos.

The band's performance Saturday night at the Hyperactive Music Festival, at the Downtown El Rey Theater, will serve as a video-release party for "So, This Is the Way It Feels."

"It's not a happy song," Shamburger says with a shade of understatement. "You can almost put a question mark after it."

It's a pretty good representative of the entire disc.

"The album is about the cycle of relationships, all kinds of them - traumatic, horrible, beautiful - all rolled into one," he said.

Shamburger, who at 30 is the oldest member of the group, came to Albuquerque after college and formed the band nearly six years ago with Jared Ashcraft. Drummer Ian Byrd arrived about a year later. In 2005, they added the muscle of Brian Lee's guitar, and the band's sound (which has been compared to Radiohead and Coldplay) solidified.

And that's about the time they decided to get serious and give the rock thing a real shot.

"A couple of years ago, we made a decision: Are we going to do this?" Shamburger said. "And to do this we need to get out there and risk our jobs."

The gamble seems to be paying off. Soular landed a record deal last year with Astonish Records.

"It's been a little over two years of intensity," Shamburger said "and it keeps picking up with more intensity."

"Love Crash Heal" was a mere pit stop on the road trip. Shamburger said they got short notice to head to the studio in Portland, Ore., where in two weeks in December they finished writing songs and recorded them.

They came back to Albuquerque last month for a CD-release show and played to a full house. "The first time we played the Launchpad there were maybe 10 people there," Shamburger recalled of the early days. "It's nice to see that through time hard work pays off."

One song, "American Dream," looks beyond the facade of that work ethic, among other promises. The band, on its Web site, says the song wrestles with the "tension and correlation . . . between what we hate and what we want. . . . Musically, we wanted to create a tension between the musical elements and the vocals."

The "spoon-fed" idea of the American dream for Shamburger originally meant college, a degree and a family, he said. Now he sounds a little road wary.

"Our country is changing in a lot of ways, where we're seeing a lot of cracks in the American dream," he said. "And we're seeing that maybe we're not as great a country as we thought we were, and maybe we're more connected to the world than we thought."

That dim view isn't necessarily personal, he said.

"Songs look at something, and they don't always make a moral judgment," he said. "They're just observing."

But then his positive, hopeful side comes out. Shamburger sounds energized when he talks about the classic rock of the 1960s and Õ70s that band members cut their teeth on. Soular's song "Faking a Gun" clearly channels the Beatles, David Bowie and Queen. And, Shamburger adds, a dash of Rachmaninoff.

"We're fans of melody, arrangement and sounds, anyone who is experimenting out there," he said. "Historically, when you look at the people who do that, they're our teachers."

And he is cheered by the way music is getting a fresh shot through technology like MySpace.

"The great thing about the music industry is that it is changing for the good," Shamburger said. "The fan is being more educated about what they listen to. They've seen through the false things that the industry tries to shove down their throats."

Shamburger suggests it's all part of a search for what is "genuine" somewhere in this "fake world we live in."

One example of a genuine connection will bring the band back through Oklahoma this summer.

Soular is on a multiband bill scheduled to play the Fourth of July show in Pratt, Kan.

Recently, Shamburger said, the band learned that Pratt is the town housing most of the victims of the recent tornadoes that leveled the nearby town of Greensburg.

Soular decided to turn the show into a fund-raiser with the help of the other bands and corporate sponsors. The band will waive its fee for that gig.

"We thought, maybe we can use our relationships that we made on the road to help maybe alleviate one small part of the loss that those people are going through that we can't ever begin to relate to," he said.

It's called the Freedom Celebration Festival.