The new Cave In album, their major-label debut, is called Antenna (RCA), which is a suitably obscure and pleasing three-syllable title for an album if your last one was named Jupiter but fails to offer even a brief glimpse of what’s waiting inside. It begs for a subtitle: How To Stuff a Gas Giant into a Three-Minute Pop Song, maybe, or Honey, I Shrunk the Cave In. Or a sticker: " New! Improved! Fewer Calories! "

Alas, Antenna will have to do. It comes out this Tuesday, and it’s worth whatever they’re asking. For one thing, there are a dozen songs on it, a 50 percent increase over Jupiter’s eight. Yes, these are shorter — with the exception of " Seafrost, " a mid-album ambient-metal excursion that eclipses the eight-minute mark — but they’re healthier than the old ones. " We cut out the fat, " says frontman Steve Brodsky, who at the time is munching on a meatless meatball sandwich. On a rainy Sunday afternoon less than a week after returning from Cave In’s second European headlining tour, he’s still suffering from residual jet lag, and his disposition, overcast on the sunniest of days, is all storm clouds. So we talk about food. Old habits die hard: even though he no longer renounces the consumption of animal flesh (chicken proved to be his weak link), he’s still partial to the well-executed meatless novelty dish.

Brodsky’s lapsed vegetarianism — six years’ worth, including a year as a full-on vegan — was part of a package deal: it came, in his teens, attached to the five-and-dime instant-social-consciousness kit they handed out with Earth Crisis records in the ‘90s. " I grew up a hardcore kid, man. I mean, major labels were the devil. When [‘zine] Heart Attack put that in bold print, I believed it. And when Punk Planet put that in bold print, I believed it. And I still believe it, to some extent. " He pauses. " That was one of the scariest things we’ve ever had to come to terms with: the fact that we wanted to be on a major label. "

Despite their reservations, or perhaps because of them, the band have surrounded themselves with a top-notch team. Their manager once served in the same capacity for Rage Against the Machine. Their A&R man at RCA also represents Foo Fighters, who took Cave In along for a Euro jaunt a few months ago. (During the expedition, a journalist asked Dave Grohl to name the one thing he wished he’d done last year. He said he wished he’d recorded Cave In.) Brodsky took lessons from a vocal coach whose clients have included Axl Rose, Janet Jackson, Björk, and Maynard James Keenan. The band found an ideal match in engineer Rich Costey, who helmed the Antenna sessions in Los Angeles: if you can find a guy whose résumé includes albums by death-metal fiends Otep, minimalist composer Philip Glass, and Beatles Revolver fanatics the Apples in Stereo, you’ve found your perfect Cave In producer.

The video for Antenna’s lead single, " Anchor, " was directed by Dean Karr — who has lensed Godsmack and Marilyn Manson, among countless others — and stars Richard Edson, who holds the distinction of having appeared in one of Brodsky’s all-time favorite movies (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) as well as having been the first drummer in one of his all-time favorite bands (Sonic Youth). For their part, Cave In have produced your classic major-label debut: reasonably concise, catchy as hell, vocals up front in the mix, a platoon of serrated guitar tracks hovering in the middle distance. Brodsky’s falsetto, deployed early and often on Jupiter, has been reined in; this time around, he’s leveraged his delivery with more James Hetfield and less Geddy Lee. If Antenna is Jupiter on a slim-fast diet, what the weight loss reveals is that an atom-smashing rock-and-roll band have been lurking in there all along. Like Foo Fighters, the Cave In of Antenna are adept at pairing neck-snapping hard-rock verses with buoyant soft-rock choruses — the album kicks you in the teeth and then offers you a Popsicle.

Jupiter’s oscillating metallic sonatas established Brodsky and fellow ax man Adam McGrath as 21st-century guitar gods, able to switch from Converge-strength convulsions into luminous, kaleidoscopic fractals — from crushing gravity to weightlessness — in a single effects-pedal stomp. But on Antenna the pair indulge in some old-fashioned 20th-century guitar heroism. The stairway-buckling sledgehammer-of-the-gods riff from " Inspire " makes Zep’s " Immigrant Song " sound pouty by comparison. And " Joy Opposites " — an honest-to-goodness love song — culminates in one of the most lyrical and sentimental guitar solos since the one Slash played outside the church where Axl got married in " November Rain. " (Brodsky, who is always candid about his influences, claims the resemblance is unintentional but allows that the top-hatted one was " the reason I wanted to play guitar. " )

Through it all, they’ve managed to batten down the hatches while maintaining the expansive sense of majesty that’s been their hallmark since their Creative Eclipses EP ushered them out of hardcore and into a wider world. The slacker mantra of the album-closing " Woodwork " — " Let’s all underachieve " — is the only thing linking it to Nirvana; the music itself is anthemic, and the singer’s gust of fatalism seems to dissolve in a dramatically overachieving outward-rippling shimmer.

But in person, fatalism still occasionally gets the better of Brodsky. Listening to Antenna, you can easily forget that he’s just 23 years old. At times it seems his mistrust of major labels hasn’t abated; signing to one has only made him question himself that much more. Asked about the choice of " Anchor " as a first single, he grins sourly. " It’s the obvious choice, isn’t it? " The song features one of the disc’s most slashing, corrosive riffs, but I hadn’t heard it as a natural choice. " It’s the song that basically any band could’ve written. More or less it’s a dumb rock song. " He adds that it isn’t the one he would have chosen but that people outside the band seem to gravitate toward it. A few days later, I notice that the song clocks in at three minutes and 15 seconds — the universally agreed-upon ideal length for a pop song, at least as far as radio is concerned. And its chorus sounds like something a songwriter would say, with spitting irony, to a major label that had just picked a single based on its running time: " You know better than I do/So clue me in. "

Although he writes " 80 percent " of the band’s music, Brodsky’s still loath to be the center of attention. " I’m probably the most socially retarded person in the band. I’m definitely the most moody, I’m definitely the most apt to freak out. And if I wasn’t around three other solid, strong-headed guys . . . And I think about that all the time. Whenever I read something about our record that focuses more on me, I just feel like I should take that much more time in interviews to explain that I really do value those guys, both musically and on a personal basis. "

If you want to get him steamed, try comparing Cave In to Radiohead. " There’s such a lack of power in their rhythm section, and I feel like it’s almost an insult to J.R. and Caleb [drummer J.R. Connors and bassist Caleb Scofield], you know? I mean, Caleb’s bass rig is possibly the loudest piece of equipment I’ve ever heard. There have been times that J.R. hits his drums so hard that there’s no tone. Especially in the toms. And that’s just part of how he plays. Because for years we were telling him, ‘Play harder, play harder, play harder.’ Now he plays too hard sometimes. "

Cave In formed in Methuen in the mid ‘90s, when its members were still in high school. Even in their most straightforward metalcore days, when they went through a few different lead singers as a five-piece, they sounded exceptional. On one of their earliest singles, " Crossbearer, " the Neurosis/Converge–like onslaught of riffage and screaming breaks opens — just briefly — for a single yearning, sung coda. It’s a formula that’s evident in the music of a wave of screamo/artcore bands recently signed by major labels — Vendetta Red, AFI, and Blood Brothers, to name a few. But Cave In, having gotten it right the first time, never repeated it. Instead, they’ve matured at a frightening pace. ( " I’ve grown up too soon, " Brodsky sings on Antenna’s sunniest tune, " Youth Overrided. " ) By the time Brodsky took over lead-vocal duties for 1999’s Until Your Heart Stops (Hydrahead) — a Converge-like art-metal convulsion that ushered the group to the front of the line in Massachusetts’s burgeoning and influential metalcore scene — the band were growing disillusioned with hardcore dogma.

" I just knew too many kids who were either lonely or depressed in general who used straight-edge and veganism as another excuse to hate people, " Brodsky says. And that skepticism has served the band well: almost everything they’ve done since Until Your Heart Stops has in one sense been an act of deliberate provocation directed at the hardcore audience that once championed them — from the grungy psychedelia and protest folk of Creative Eclipses to the Moons of Jupiter EP that saw Brodsky stripping a few tunes down to solo piano ballads.

Even before Jupiter, they’d already declared their ambition to make radical album-to-album evolutions that mirrored the career trajectories of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys, and Pink Floyd, not to mention post-grunge outfits like Failure and Quicksand — the best rock albums, they believe, challenge their audience’s expectations. " It was much more challenging to write this record, " says Brodsky of Antenna. " It’s really hard to write short, concise, satisfying pop songs. I mean, people look at it as if we sort of just went pop, but for us, it was just another side of us in our experimentalism, you know? Not every record’s gonna sound like Antenna. There doesn’t need to be a chorus in every song. " He’s begun to sound mopy again. " I don’t think there’s a chorus in ‘Seafrost.’ Does that count? "

Still, he must recognize Antenna as a breakthrough, right? " Well, I think these songs will keep our interest for a lot longer than some of the songs on our other records have. There comes a point after the 200th time of playing [Jupiter’s] ‘Innuendo and Out the Other’ where at the five-minute mark I’m sitting there wishing it was over. Like, ‘Why are we repeating the most boring part of the song 50 times for three minutes?’ And there’s less of that here. We just sort of took our favorite parts of Jupiter and crammed it more into that pop-song template — without it being too watered down. I mean, it virtually sounds like the same band. There isn’t a string section or anything. "

I tell him I’m in agreement: the things we’ve come to expect from Cave In — those squiggly effects pedals that make the guitars go blasting off into the edges of the frame all squiggly and twinkling-like, the Ritalin-deprived rhythm section in convulsions — are still present and accounted for. It’s like pulling teeth, but Brodsky finally admits to being happy with the damn record. " There are a few songs in particular that I think are accomplishments for us. Like ‘Joy Opposites’ and ‘Youth Overrided,’ mainly because they sound like something we couldn’t have written five years ago. Or even two years ago. But they still sound like our band. "