With Winning Days, the Vines shimmy higher up the evolutionary ladder.

It must be pretty heady to be called "the best band since Nirvana" and to have your first release dubbed "an album you must own."

The Vines received both of these accolades, and more, in 2002 and 2003, as the Australian group's debut, Highly Evolved, wended its way towards platinum, launching hits like "Get Free," "Factory" and the title track. The Sydney quartet, suddenly magazine cover fodder, was lumped in with the Strokes and the Hives as saviors of the new rock movement.

The band could easily have rested upon such praises as they set out to make their second album, Winning Days. But singer-guitarist and chief songwriter Craig Nicholls says that while a little buzz is certainly rewarding, it hardly rendered his band complacent.

"It's great that other people are getting into it," says Nicholls, 26. "We were really happy with [Highly Evolved], but at the same time it wasn't like, 'Yeah, this is it. We're great. We're gonna be famous.'

"We just thought writing songs was really fun and recording them was cool, and we really wanted to play in a band. This is an opportunity to be artistic and maybe we work very hard. The band is important, a attention we're getting, but at the same time make a living at it. We're appreciative of the sacred thing to us."

Still, says bassist Patrick Matthews, the atmosphere at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, N.Y., where the Vines spent three months recording Winning Days with Highly Evolved producer Rob Schnapf, was anything but high-pressure.

"If there was pressure on us for a second record, we sort of converted that into working on it on the road so when we went into the studio we didn't have to write anything," says Matthews, 28, who co-founded the Vines with Nicholls when both were still in high school and working at a McDonald's. (They remain fast food addicts on the road.)

"The idea was you've got to make time to do stuff at sound check and play some new songs live and that sort of thing. It's not too hard, really."

So the Vines - guitarist Ryan Griffiths and drummer Hamish Rosser round out the group - brought plenty of new material into the studio last May, just a few days after wrapping up the 18-month world tour for Highly Evolved with a gig in Dublin. Matthews says the group didn't want to record again in Los Angeles and hoped to lure Schnapf to Sydney to make the album. The producer, however, chose the bucolic setting in Woodstock.

"It was probably a good idea, from Rob's point of view, to assume correctly that we'd work well in that environment," Matthews acknowledges. "It didn't have that much of an effect on how it sounded, but there were definitely no distractions and it was very relaxed."

And it wasn't 24-7 music-making, either. The Vines set up an air-gun target range in a paddock on the studio property and had a good time taking their rental car for a spin in the fields. "We've never had the thrill of driving a car through long grass," Matthews notes. "We did it more often than we should have, but the agency didn't charge us any extra for it, even though there were some big dings that we didn't point out."

The Vines also got to know Woodstock's two bars - as well as the local wildlife. The bears, according to Matthews, even took to hanging around outside the studio while the band was playing "for any pizza boxes we might throw outside."

Inside, however, it was serious business as the Vines sought to create a broader and more diverse work than Highly Evolved.

"To some people we're like these dudes from Australia who play like Nirvana, and that's all," says Nicholls. "I think we have the determination and the ability to really progress with the songs."

On Winning Days the Vines do sound a bit further evolved. The dynamic range is greater across the new album's 11 songs, from the hard rocking blister of "Ride" and "Animal Machine" to the trippy folk stylings of "Sun Child" and the acoustic chime of "Amnesia" and "Autumn Shade 2."

Matthews contends that same breadth was at work on Highly Evolved, but he accepts the idea that "maybe we just did it better this time."

"On the first record we had people saying 'Oh, they're trying to rip off 30 years of music in one record, and it doesn't work," the bassist recalls. "This time we really wanted to make the band sound like a single entity playing a range of music, like the same band playing a whole lot of different songs, better."

And, Matthews adds, he wouldn't mind if the Vines lost some of their most frequent musical associations in the process.

"We obviously don't really fit with the Strokes and White Stripes and whatever," he says. "It's not the same, apart from the fact that I like those bands, and I like us. I always find it flattering 'cause they're really good bands, I thought, important bands.

"But it's frustrating, too, 'cause you read these articles that say we're in this 'new rock revolution' with the Hives or something, but I never saw anybody bring up the Vines in White Stripes or Strokes interviews. The only conclusion you draw from that is we're not on the same level, at least in journalists' minds."

But as far as Nicholls is concerned, what goes on in the Vines' own minds is all that matters. 

"As time goes by, we hope to get better in every area," he says. "Music is a powerful thing, and we want to give back to music and to make sure it keeps going.

"We're serious about it, and we have fun with it; there's that understanding that it's both things, not just one or the other."