Previously touted as rock ‘n’ roll’s wildest children, the Vines have mellowed out with a new album that doesn’t smell quite so much like teen spirit.

When the Vines appeared in 2002 as the Australian component of the media-fueled garage-rock revival, frontman Craig Nicholls seemed willing to do anything to keep his band’s name aloft in orbit next to the Strokes and the Hives. At early Vines shows in the U.S., the band wouldn’t so much play the trashy grunge pop from the debut, Highly Evolved, as stumble around in an evidently drunken stupor, mishandling instruments and plowing through OutKast’s ‘Ms. Jackson.’ Roman Coppola hauled out the splashy special effects for the band’s first video, ‘Get Free.’ And no magazine profile was complete without a wrecked dressing room or Nicholls’ taking a hit from his beloved bong.

Yet two years later, over French fries and Cokes at a hushed Manhattan lounge, Nicholls is quiet and reserved as he explains what he and his bandmates have been up to since Highly Evolved made them instant rock stars. “Watching tv and listening to music, basically,” he says, “and doing a bit of songwriting here and there.” 

If that’s a surprise coming from these hard-living rock ‘n’ roll rebels, you can hear the effects on Winning Days, the Vines’ second album. It’s a cozy collection of folksy pop songs marked by relaxed tempos and creamy Beach Boys-inspired harmonies, and only occasionally bruised by searing electric guitar fuzz. True, lead single, ‘Ride,’ does unload a bratty chorus redolent of teen-spirit abandon (and, sure, the closer’s called, um, ‘Fuck the World’), but Winning Days really wins in slower, dreamier tunes like the shuffling ‘Autumn Shade II,’ and the bouncy ‘Rainfall,’ whose dubbed-in thunder rolls Nicholls admits producer Rob Schnapf advised against. The gently plucked title track doesn’t have much to do with any current notion of garage rock; instead, it’s a throwback to the sweetly shambling early-90s indie pop of the Lemonheads and Dinosaur Jr.

After Highly Evolved’s extended touring schedule finally would down – Nicholls says he went home two or three times over the span of about two years – the band immediately decamped to Woodstock, New York, where they were set to start work on Winning Days with Schnapf at Bearsville Studios, a wooded outpost where the band saw “animals we’ve never seen before.” (“There actually were bears,” remembers bassist Patrick Matthews, the Vines’ other permanent member. “And spiders everywhere in the house.”) After recording Highly Evolved in L.A., they found the remote surroundings a welcome change in environment.

 “Mostly we just didn’t have to deal with the madness of traffic and noise and people asking you for money on the street,” Nicholls says. “Nothing against homeless people,” he adds, suddenly wary of offending anyone. “Hopefully, if we have any spare guitars we can give ‘em to them.” 

The frontman credits the mellowing of the Vines’ sound in part to the four months the band spent at Bearsville and the respite it provided from the rock-scene mania they’d begun to tire of. 

“The studio was actually a hundred yards from the house, so that walk was relaxing, to go off and have lunch at home and then come back,” says Matthews. “I think it relaxed Craig’s vocal takes.”

“Yeah, it did,” Nicholls agrees, digging deeper into his fries. “Most of the songs kind of revolve around this nature theme. I guess I liked it because it was similar to where we grew up in Australia – a lot of trees and a lot of space and lot of green. I just think the album’s more sophisticated overall; the sounds are more consciously thought out. It’s got a good vibe to it.”