One of the songs that jumps out of the new Spoon record is "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb," a pop-soul tune that rides a groove right out of the Supremes songbook.

"We tried the song in a lot of different ways," says Spoon frontman Britt Daniel. "We tried a space-rock version with a lot of synthesizers. And it was actually a lot better than that sounds. I made a demo like that, and I could never duplicate it. We tried it a bunch of ways, then we tried it with this beat and that piano, and it clicked the first time.

"I remember when we were mixing it, our producer said, 'Get used to it -- it's going to be on radio. All the time.' I was, like, 'I don't know about that.' "

And has Daniel ever heard it on the radio?

"I don't think I ever have heard it on the radio."

If he listened to WYEP he may would have heard it on the radio, but, in general, programmers at commercial stations aren't looking at critic lists to decide what to play.

While the veteran indie-rock band from Austin, Texas, isn't getting love from radio -- not surprising considering it's on the indie label Merge -- Spoon's oddly titled "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" has been its biggest breakthrough. It debuted at No. 10 on the charts -- thanks in part to a single, "The Underdog," that sounds oddly like a Billy Joel song -- and sent the band on a tour of the late-night talk shows.

"Those things are fun to do," Daniel says. "Sometimes they can be nerve-wracking. It's something that your parents like, and your aunts and uncles and cousins who are never going to come to the show can feel that someone they know is on TV."

Even bigger than Letterman and Conan was a spot on "Saturday Night Live" -- generally a sure sign that a band has arrived.

"That was the most fun of all. That was really a singular experience," Daniel says. "Something I never would thought we could get the opportunity to do."

"Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" is the sixth record from Spoon, which formed in Austin in 1993, taking its name from a song by the avant-garde German band Can. It drew early comparisons to the British post-punk band Wire and after a debut on Matador, Spoon was signed to Elektra but dropped after one album.

Rather than pack it in, Spoon persisted and produced a string of records, including "Kill the Moonlight" and "Gimme Fiction," that have become classics among indie-rock fans and critics.

"Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" is a bit lighter and more R&B-oriented than past efforts, with "Cherry Bomb," a funky cover of the Natural History's "Don't You Evah" and "Eddie's Ragga," a song that sounds like it came off of The Clash's "Sandinista."

"I can see why people say that," Daniel says. "That was a song that kind of came up when we were just jamming, which we don't do very often. But I think we were just trying to come up with a song that had a different feel, that didn't sound like someone wrote at home alone."

"Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" has also drawn acclaim for its brevity. It clocks in at a spare 36 minutes with 10 tracks.

"We had another song called 'Kindness Kills,' " Daniel says, "and another one, 'The Book I Write,' which did come out on a soundtrack [to 'Stranger Than Fiction']. Those two were also going to be on the record, but then we felt the strongest version of the record was the one that didn't have those two. I like the short records. People forget that 'Led Zeppelin IV' only had eight songs on it."

Now, Spoon turns up at the Carnegie Library Music Hall of Homestead, having just played one of the biggest-attended shows at SXSW in Austin.

Part of the band's expanded following can be attributed to the song "The Way We Get By" landing on "The O.C."

How did that impact the band's core audience?

"I haven't gone out and polled during the show," Daniel says dryly. "But yeah, around the time we did those first 'O.C.' placements, there were a lot of young people, especially young girls, who kind of came along as well. But I never felt like we lost the core. It just seems like our audience has gotten a little bigger, and, hopefully, it doesn't turn people off that young girls are into it."