The Goo Goo Dolls: Boy Named Goo.

Gutterflower is in stores Monday.

The Goo Goo Dolls’ Robby Takac sounds not-at-all worried about the expectations of his band’s new album Gutterflower. It follows their 1998 six-million-selling effort Dizzy Up The Girl, so obviously industry eyes will be checking the progress of the band’s just-released new album with great interest. What’s more important to the laid-back bassist is that the band is chuffed with the artistic quality of the new record.

“I think if we weren’t happy, you’d be reading a press release saying, “God we’re so sorry, but we’re breaking up!” says Robby. “That’s a rule we made ten years ago, if we can’t manage to make a record we like, we won’t put it out and that’ll be it.”

Of Dizzy Up The Girl’s serious unit-shifting feats, Robby says “That’s just a happy coincidence when you make a good record. I think that it’s really important that you separate yourself from the concept of making a good record versus selling a lot of records.”

Gutterflower looks set to continue the multi-platinum status of its predecessor. It also happens to be very good, a seamless, confident collection of chunky, melodic pop rock, with cry-in-your-beer ballads mixing it up with summery rock that sounds great coming out of convertibles. Simultaneously custom-made for FM radio (thanks in no small part to a muscular production from Green Day cohort Rob Cavallo) and displaying a sense of poignant introspection, Gutterflower is also the first new studio album from the Goo Goo Dolls in four years.

“It seems like a long time between records, but with the last album, we made the record and went out and toured on it for two years,” Robby explains. “We took about six months off after that, then we wrote and recorded the new album and that brings us to right now. So, it doesn’t seem to us that we took a long time between records, but I guess, yeah, it has been four years.”

In this country, the Goo Goo Dolls are perhaps best known for the mega-popular ballad Iris, a soaring, sweeping affair with a rising chorus that has surely prompted a record quantity of held-aloft lighters at concerts. As a result, a lot of people thought Goo Goo Dolls were a late ‘90s overnight sensation, when in actual fact the band have been with us since 1985.

“That’s one of the reasons that we released that Ego record last year, with all the remixes of the not-so-known songs that we’d recorded over the years,” says Robby. “We just wanted to show people that our music comes from a very real place. We get sandwiched between J Lo and Jessica Simpson sometimes; I ‘m not quite sure how that happens! But I’m not going to complain about it, because I’m standing in my studio in Los Angeles and I’d be a fool to complain. And you know what, no one needs to hear rock stars complain, right? ‘Cos that shit bums me out, man!”

Talking about being bummed out, the more difficult side of human interaction is a common theme in Goo Goo Dolls songs. I read one interview with the band, in which Robby said the failure of communication was the constant theme running through the band’s work.

“Yeah, ‘cos failure to communicate is everything, that’s why all problems happen,” he elaborates. “If there was an open line of communication, there would be no problems, everything would sort itself out. But certain people, myself included, refuse to listen to certain things and I think communicating with each other in the group, communicating with people who are affected by things we deal with every day, that’s pretty much the fodder we have to write about. Johnny likes to write from another character’s perspective sometimes, so he can get to NOT do that, and it’s not his ass on the line.”

So he mixes autobiography with fiction?

“Yeah, in an interview we were doing this morning, I heard him say his songs are like docudramas, you don’t know where the history stops and the fiction begins.”

What about yourself?

“Well, it’s funny, because I just got married in August and I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life, but all I could think to write about was, you know, the ding-dong chick I knew a few years ago! Ha Ha! It’s so funny, my wife is like ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and I say, ‘I don’t know, it’s just easier to write about someone I’m mad at!”

With another Australian visit on the cards, Robby is enthusiastic about the band’s return.

“We’ve always felt a connection with Australia, because we’re fans of a lot of the old Australian punk bands. Celibate Rifles, Lime Spiders, stuff like that.”

And as you’re not exactly spring chickens yourselves, I’m guessing you’d be a pretty well oiled live machine by now?

“The system shall not break down, my friend,” Robby answers with mock solemnity. “That’s our motto.”