"Jimmy Eat World - and I don't care."

According to bassist Rick Birch, that single-line, thumbs-down review of Jimmy Eat World's 1996 sophomore album Static Prevails is the greatest thing he's ever read about the band.

These days, the reception to the Mesa, Ariz., power-pop outfit is a bit more favourable.

"We've had some of the best shows we've ever had on this tour," Birch says. "It's nice to know that people are still interested in what we're doing 15 years later."

Indeed, the interest in Jimmy Eat World -which is rounded out by Jim Adkins (vocals/guitar), Tom Linton (guitar) and Zack Lind (drums) - has been rekindled by 2007's acclaimed Chase This Light, the band's sixth full-length record and its first foray into self-production.

"Normally, we've had a traditional producer, someone who's there every day and is really hands-on," Birch says. "We decided to take a crack at producing it ourselves, but we still wanted to have that fifth set of ears."

Enter famed Nirvana/Sonic Youth sound wizard Butch Vig, who served as a satellite executive producer on Chase This Light. Birch, 33, says Vig took a mostly hands-off approach, allowing the band to figure things out for itself.

"We learned a lot," Birch says of the experience. "It forced us to come up with the solutions ourselves - which was tough sometimes. You have to get out of your comfort zone."

In a more literal sense, however, the band was very much in its comfort zone.

"We recorded at our home studio in Arizona this time," Birch says. "We had a rehearsal studio but we put some money into it and fixed it up. It was kind of like home court advantage - it was really comfortable. We got to sleep in our own beds. We got to have an ordinary life at the same time and I think you can hear that on the record."

Chase This Light also sees the quartet further stripping away its emo label, one that was slapped on the band in the early '90s as rock scribes grappled with how to describe the melodic punk of acts such as Sunny Day Real Estate and Jimmy Eat World - bands heavily influenced by Washington D.C.'s hardcore scene and one of its major exports, Fugazi.

Emo has always been a nebulous term (Death Cab For Cutie, Dashboard Confessional and Weezer have all been called emo), but in the 15 years that Jimmy Eat World has been making music, the definition has become less and less applicable to the band.

"I've always associated the term with D.C. hardcore from the late '80s," Birch says. "Now, it's bands like My Chemical Romance, and it's more image-based as opposed to sound-based."

"When it first started getting thrown at us, we were like, 'What? We're just four kids in a rock band.'

"We still feel like that - only now, we're not kids anymore."