The Hives

While a slick black-and-white wardrobe and cartoon-ish stage names (America, please welcome guitarist Vigilante Carlstroem, bassist Dr. Matt Destruction, and three other svelte Swedes) may have made the Hives look like prepackaged garage rock headliners at first, whiplash-inducing hits like "Hate to Say I Told You So" and "Walk Idiot Walk" quickly proved just how solid the band's songwriting is, shtick factor and all. Listen closely and you'll realize their sonic arsenal isn't limited to thrill-ride riffs and a gut-punching rhythm section, either, from the massaged melodies and tinkling bells of "Won't Be Long" to the whimpering strings and tortured screams of "Diabolic Scheme." All of which makes sense once you realize the band's been around since the mid '90s — sharpening their sound with the kind of sneak attacks that dot our Next Steps.

Are you thinking what we're thinking? Namely, the following: How did the garage-groomed, pedal-through-the-floor punk rockers of Barely Legal and its follow-up EP, a.k.a. I-D-I-O-T, end up working with Pharrell Williams a decade later (the ballroom blitz choruses of "Well All Right!," the note-bending, glammed-up funk of "T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S.")? The turning-point tracks of Tyrannosaurus Hives reveal a handful of hints, including the gnarled new wave of "A Little More for Little You" and the spring-loaded spy groove of "B Is For Brutus." Other than that, who knows? And who cares, really, so long as the Hives keep cranking out genuine rock 'n' roll cuts, like "Square One Here I Come" and "Outsmarted."

Look, we can't blame you for assigning a short shelf life to the Hives after they landed smack dab at the forefront of the garage rock revival in 2002. (See the instant Molotov cocktail recipe of Veni Vidi Vicious.) No matter how you slice that situation, it's kinda hard to take a band seriously when they're wearing matching suits and saying, "we're God's gift to rock 'n' roll!" in more ways than one — many more. That is until you let the tunes take over: four albums-plus of pure, unadulterated pop as seen through the eyes of a nitrous-fueled speed freak . . . or Iggy, circa Raw Power. Not just the adrenaline-pumping intersection between garage and punk; try the surface-tension addition of admitted left-field influences like Devo and Kraftwerk, both of which can be heard on Tyrannosaurus Hives and The Black and White Album. What's next? A single produced by Timbaland? Oh, wait…