It’s become a familiar story in recent years: The heartbroken singer pours his sorrows into a spontaneous, cheaply recorded album. Via the Internet, it strikes an unexpected chord with indie music fans. Caught off guard, our hero has to throw together a band and tour before the spotlight roves on. Think Bon Iver, Wavves, the Antlers. In each case, there’s a charmed period when you exist as pure potential. Everybody loves you, but with a certain provisional expectancy. Suddenly, you have to decide how you want to portray yourself, almost cynically, in marked contrast to the soul-searching experience of making the album in the first place. Emphasis shifts from intuition to action. Your foot is in the door; you are not.

The Love Language, a 7-piece band based in Chapel Hill, is an ideal case study in how the world looks from inside that tenuous bubble. Everything is distended, curved, deformed to strange proportions––your reputation, the public’s perception of your music, and your sense of urgency around playing pop songs. You’ve spent your whole life idly dreaming of the world paying attention to you, and suddenly, it is. This is disorienting, and musicians handle it in different ways. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon seemed to adapt fast, sliding easily into upscale magazine profiles and Starbucks compilations. Wavves’ Nathan Williams, on the other hand, performed a notorious show at Barcelona’s Primavera Music Festival that the media have branded a “meltdown.” These two cases illustrate the extremes The Love Language must navigate on their way from potential to solidity.

The members of the band, when I met them at their home and studio in Chapel Hill, seemed to have adapted a sort of alert resolve. In the broad, tree-filled yard of their country house, amid yellow skeins of falling leaves, they appeared casual yet somehow posed. The gray, serious weather made the scene look even more like one of those band photos where the subjects scatter out, in various postures of studied self-possession, each gaze tracing a different plane. They talked about their plans for the band at length and with great optimism, behind which lurked the tension of the pressures they faced, which manifested in carefully worded answers and a tendency to refine each other’s comments. Frontman Stuart McLamb was prone to saying things like, “You might want to edit this part down,” as if he were already writing the article in his mind. They’re focused on the new album, but alive to the intricacies of shaping their media image, which has already crystallized around a few biographical points.

You’re probably already familiar with the sound bites around the first album: How McLamb was kicked out of the band the Capulets (which included current members of The Love Language), and later trashed their studio on a bad drunk; how a break-up and continued binge drinking landed him back as his parents’ house, where he recorded the self-titled Love Language debut as a one-man band, filled with cryptic autobiographical songs about destructive love. The album he began in 2006, recording on faulty equipment because it was at hand, was released on Bladen County Records in 2009, after a friend of McLamb’s played the demos in a record store where he worked, where it was overheard by a cousin of the label’s owner. All of this happened when lo-fi pop-rock music happened to be enjoying a resurgence of indie cachet, and McLamb’s songs, buried in buckets of reverb and stinging guitars, aligned with the trend. The record drew rapturous comparisons to Big Star, the Arcade Fire, and Guided by Voices.