For two reasons, the artsy, hardcore quintet is the perfect litmus test for music-lovers ready to take the plunge into the depths of emo and indie rock. First, Cursive is signed to the hot independent label-of-the-week, Saddle Creek Records, and resides in the burgeoning indie-rock hotbed of Omaha, Nebraska.

Secondly, in March, the band released what is undoubtably one of the best records of the year, The Ugly Organ, a complicated, self-mocking concept album blending the finer points of hardcore rock with rigid string arrangements and brilliant lyrical motifs. While your brain is chewing on frontman Tim Kasher's operatic text (the liner notes even include stage directions) and the dischordant interplay of Gretta Cohn's cello with guitarist Ted Stevens' blips and bleeps, your fists are flailing on your steering wheel in pure, rock-and-roll extasy. If this album doesn't grab you on the first listen, play it again - you may have missed the irony.

"With The Ugly Organ, we were pretty worried and convinced that no one was going to like it," Kasher admits. "We ended up ... having this heart-to-heart when we were mixing the record down where we were like, 'You know, we're not really sure what we just did here, but let's just remind ourselves that we love this record and that this is exactly the way that we want it to sound, and if nobody goes for it, let's just say right now that we don't give a shit, because we're so happy already with the way it worked out.' So we all really mean it when we say we can't fucking believe it that people have gotten into it as much as they have. We're psyched."

And people have gotten into it, thanks to sparkling reviews from mainstream press like Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and Time magazine. In one grand media sweep, one of indie rock's best-kept secrets was outed to the public.

"We're fine with it. It's really not such a creepy, overwhelming amount of attention," Kasher says. "I guess I could say that initially it all happened a little too fast for me. ... I didn't take to it too well at first. But now that it's been out for a few months, I'm really happy."

After 10 years and two different stints (Kasher briefly dissolved the band in the late 1990s), Cursive's broader success has been a long time coming. But now that the major labels are fishing for fresh, young emo bands to sign, Kasher isn't biting.

"There's not much that would benefit us at this point on a major," he explains. "I can't imagine what the deal would be that would be better than our present situation. It would have to be so remarkable, and even then I don't know if it would matter."

So maybe the elitist underground will maintain its stranglehold on Cursive after all - for the time being, at least. As for future albums, Kasher isn't exactly itching to write that "TRL"-friendly record that will send Cursive hurdling up the mainstream charts. "I probably would like [the next album] more to be the creepy, art-rock record or something. But that's what's great about us getting together, is that the other guys keep me grounded. They keep the ideas grounded into something a little more realistic," he says. "I never really know. I always try to prophesize what the next record's going to sound like, and I'm usually wrong. ... We just really feel like as long as we're writing exactly what we believe in, then there's no reason to worry about it. If people like it, that's nice."