Orbit have always been an easy band to take for granted. They came along in the mid ’90s, when the last thing Boston seemed to need was yet another alt-rock guitar trio who looked good, played hard, and wrote catchy tunes. So though Orbit have never had a problem being well liked, they seldom turned up on the lists of Boston’s hottest or hippest bands.

But a few years can make a lot of difference. And the louder and heavier things get in the mainstream, the hungrier one gets for an alternative — like, say, an alt-rock guitar trio that looks good, plays hard, and writes catchy tunes. That’s still Orbit in a nutshell, and on their new disc, XLR8R (on drummer Paul Buckley’s Lunch label), it’s something to be proud of. The band are scarred but smarter after going through the major-label wringer. They’ve added two new members and gone the DIY route. But XLR8R shows that they haven’t redefined their sound — just refined it.

Compared to Orbit’s major-label album Libido Speedway (A&M, 1997), the sound on XLR8R is more modern, making good use of the loopy bass and guitar textures that one can get from working at home with ProTools. And singer/guitarist Jeff Robbins keeps getting more resourceful as a songwriter: he’s comfortable enough to write a moody ballad like “Touch Me” alongside the kind of hooky rockers that got Orbit signed to begin with. XLR8R is an enhanced CD, and its live videos reprising most of the album tracks — some taken from club gigs, others from an acoustic living-room session — wind up capturing the band’s charm at least as well as the studio tracks. The band will celebrate the release of XLR8R with two shows at T.T. the Bear’s Place on March 2 and 3.

Orbit’s influences haven’t gotten any less easy to pinpoint: the opening title track sounds more like the Pixies than has anything Frank Black’s done solo. And strains of Hüsker Dü, Nirvana, and the Replacements turn up throughout. But here again, time and craft are on Orbit’s side: if there was overkill of that sound in 1995, nowadays it’s refreshing to hear it done well.

“I’d rather get compared to good bands than bad ones,” Robbins noted last week from his home in Providence. “We only seem to get compared to bands we like, so it’s not so bad. I wouldn’t say that our sound is derivative, but we’re fairly middle-of-the-road, nothing too avant. It’s just a question of what Paul and I like to listen to.” Adds Buckley in a separate interview at Cambridge’s 1369 Coffeehouse, “We clearly formed the band out of our love for the Pixies: that was the common ground between Jeff and myself. They were comparing us to the Pixies when we started out, and to me that was a huge compliment. But nowadays we take everything we like into every record we do, and I think it all comes out sounding like Orbit.”

Robbins also says that when Orbit started out, the plan was to carry the sound they loved a step further. “We knew we came from the Boston indie-rock kind of sound, that we were somewhere between the Pixies, Throwing Muses, Buffalo Tom, and the Lemonheads — that was the scene that we felt we were coming out of. We also felt that in the scheme of things, all those bands tended to be relatively low-fi. So we felt it would be a good idea to tackle that sound and make a giant-sounding record out of it, trying to juxtapose the big sound with our quirkier inclinations. Of course, that was the sound that later became homogenized in the form of Fuel.”

In fact, Orbit wound up more successful than many Boston bands with major-label deals: Libido Speedway got some national airplay, and Buckley says that total sales are now close to a very respectable 100,000. But that wasn’t enough to bail Orbit out when the Universal/Seagrams takeover rolled around the following year. By then they’d already completed a follow-up album, Guide to Better Living, and had to wait nearly a year before the new company finally declined to release it. (Thanks to a smart bit of negotiating, Buckley kept the right to release any Orbit material as singles or EPs on Lunch, so a few of its tracks have slipped out.) “You bet it was discouraging,” Robbins says. “Not only did we spend six months writing and recording it, but we spent another six months driving around in our cars going, ‘Hey, this is a good album. I can’t wait for it to come out.’ ”

Meanwhile Orbit’s profile was getting eclipsed by that of their bass player. Wally Gagel cut his production/engineering teeth on Libido Speedway. Then he worked on a left-field hit with Folk Implosion’s “Natural One.” Before long the Rolling Stones were bringing him aboard for indie-rock credibility on their last album. “We’d be doing a show in Houston, and Wally would fly out telling us stories about hanging out with Mick and Keith,” Robbins recalls. “And we’d say, ‘Great, we just stayed at the Motel 6 in Nowhere, West Texas.’ ” Gagel remains a friend of the band and did some mixes on XLR8R, but his bass slot has been taken over by Permafrost/Frigate member Linda Bean. And Fred Archambault, their guitar tech and part-time guitarist, has joined full-time.

At the moment, the prospect of going indie is looking more exciting to Orbit than going back to the majors. “I had a big epiphany on-stage in New York,” Robbins says. “We were playing showcases for record labels again, getting nervous for the first time in years. And it hit me that it was ridiculous, that we could really be doing it ourselves. We started out very anti-record-deal, just playing for the audience and doing what we thought was good. Then you lose yourself and start doing what other people think you should do, and that was something we got real sick of. So we wound up saying, ‘Fuck that — from now on we’re back to doing only what we think is good.’ ”

In the meantime, Buckley has become one of the busiest drummers in Boston, and the antithesis of every joke that’s ever been made about drummers. They’re supposed to be the wild ones in every band, but Buckley is disciplined enough to play in four different bands (in the past year he’s made albums with all four: Orbit, ex-Shod Dave Aronoff’s Details, ex-Bosstone Nate Albert’s new combo, and Kay Hanley, whose solo debut is nearly done). Not to mention running Lunch, which is turning into one of Boston’s most successful indie labels. Not to mention booking the currently popular Tuesday Night Music Club series at the Kendall Café. Or having a stint at WFNX, working in the marketing department and handling an overnight air shift, on his résumé.

“The good part is that nothing is keeping me in one spot,” he says. “This way I don’t always have to be worrying about when I can get another drumming gig, or what’s happening with the label. If one thing isn’t going great, something else will be.” Orbit are still his main band, but he has no problem being Boston’s answer to Jim Keltner, a precise drummer who specializes in working with songwriters. “Orbit is a team effort,” he says. “With Kay it’s Kay’s band and with Nate it’s Nate’s band. I always try to do the least amount of drumming possible, and I think songwriters like that they’re not competing with me. Plus, I play really well to a click track.”

His Lunch label was originally one of the many small and devoted indie labels in town. It was originally called Breakfast until someone from Pennsylvania showed up with that copyright (“so we just decided to move it up a meal”). But the label’s lately taken the next step, signing local acts with a strong fan base. Last year it released the Shods’ last album, and the current roster includes guitar hero Rich Gilbert’s band the Cornet Premiers and indie-pop favorites Vic Firecracker and Helicopter Helicopter. And of course, having Orbit aboard doesn’t hurt. “I guess I run a boot camp for indie rock,” Buckley says. “I’m trying to build the label slowly. If you can keep building your audience you can keep releasing records. There are some bands out there doing it — Superchunk with the Merge label and Sloan with Murder. Those are pretty close to what I aspire to be.”

Buckley was in radio from 1991 to ’95, at a time when it was looser than it is now. His overnight air shift for WFNX was relatively free-form, so he was allowed to sneak in tracks by local bands and new bands that caught his interest. He proudly notes that he was the first local DJ to play Counting Crows. Asked about the current state of rock radio, he turns diplomatic: “Rock radio to me is like an old girlfriend, where you’re still trying to find the spark again. But I think a lot of people are disenchanted.” Does he think he could fit in on the airwaves now? “Well, I definitely don’t do dick jokes.”

SCIENCE PARK’S 1999 CD Futurama (Obscure-Disk) was one of the best synth-pop albums to come out of Boston in recent years, in part because it was damn near the only synth-pop album to come out of Boston in recent years. But as the group’s leader (and at times its only member), singer/writer/keyboardist Myke Weiskopf is into synth-pop less for the campiness and more for the romance and intrigue. That continues on Disinformation (Obscure-Disk) — unlike its demo-ish predecessor, a fully produced studio disc that brings Weiskopf’s melodic gifts to the fore. There’s a release party tonight at Club Café in the South End, with a live set at 9 p.m. and free cocktails into the bargain.

Whereas Weiskopf drew from his (then-) messed-up love life on the last album, this one takes on a more exotic, international theme. “I’m concerned with geography, time, and memory, and the way those things interrelate,” he notes. “It’s all related to the album title: the first few songs deal with espionage, political disinformation, and the last ones are more about emotional treachery. There is a story line of sorts, but it’s more a concern with portraits, filmic images.” As for his earlier songs, “they tended to be somewhat immature — they don’t take a lot of responsibility for the emotions they contain. As you grow older you realize that nothing is that simple, and those kinds of songs are dangerous to yourself.”

The lusher sound should liberate Weiskopf from the Magnetic Fields comparisons he’s drawn in the past. The more obvious reference points here are the better bits of Gary Numan and OMD. “I don’t really listen to much synth-pop,” he says. “A lot of what I listen to is 20th-century electronic music, Stockhausen and the like — but of course you can’t really hear that in my music, since the emotional component comes in. So perhaps what you’re hearing is my emotional response to this very intellectual sound.”