Last year, when Jimmy Eat World (DreamWorks) reached the million mark in sales, emo officially went mainstream. Those guys had a major-label deal to work with, but their success quickly trickled down to the underground, where indie bands like Dashboard Confessional and Thursday started showing up on MTV. Thursday’s breakthrough was perhaps the most surprising of all: an artfully melodic New Jersey punk group still working all the screaming out of their systems, they recorded for Victory, the long-running indie famous for launching the careers of mosh maniacs Hatebreed, Snapcase, and Earth Crisis.

Thursday recently left Victory for the greener pastures of Island, but not before their success helped establish something of an emo franchise at the label. Victory’s latest MTV breakthrough band are Long Island’s Taking Back Sunday, who are currently enjoying a hit with " Cute without the E (Cut from the Team) " after spending a year on the road in support of their first album, Tell All Your Friends (Victory). They’re playing the Warped Tour main stage this summer, and right now they’re on their first headlining tour, which hits the Palladium in Worcester March 27.

Like Thursday, Taking Back Sunday make music that’s catchy without being slick, combining the high-impact thrills of punk with the more mannered arrangements of indie rock. As for the lyrics . . . well, there’s a reason they call this stuff emo. " Why can’t I feel anything for anyone other than you? " wails frontman Adam Lazzara at the hurt climax of " Cute without the E, " an angry shot at a cheating lover. Guitarist John Nolan empathizes with Lazzara on the microphone, and the rhythm section breaks into a brisk gallop that lightens up the mood.

According to Nolan, who splits singing and lyric-writing duties with Lazzara, the bitterness that comes out in that song (and in so many others on the album) reflects the emotional turmoil they were going through when they wrote it. " I can’t really speak for Adam, because I think he’s had a little worse experience than I have in a lot of things. But I don’t think anything I’ve ever been through is worse than what the average person goes through in their relationships. I love being able to play a show and have all these people come together that have all been touched by the same thing. "

In the early days, Taking Back Sunday were the brainchild of guitarist Ed Reyes, an East Coast punk veteran who earned his stripes in the original line-up of the current pop-punk buzz band the Movielife. Lazzara joined the group after seeing them play a show in his native North Carolina: they needed a bass player at the time, so he moved to Long Island to fill the slot. He switched to vocals when original frontman Antonio Garcia quit, and before long the reconfigured unit were ready to record an album. They made a couple of important fans at Victory, who quickly snapped them up and sent them into the studio with Thursday producer Sal Villanueva.

" We had a five-song demo that we were shopping around for a while, " Nolan explains. " It got some interest, but nothing really solid until Victory came along. Not only were they the biggest label to have ever approached us, they were also the most enthusiastic. We were excited — we signed only a couple of weeks after they got in touch with us. "

As " Cute without the E " suggests, the dueling vocal melodies, soul-baring lyrics, and instrumental flash on Tell All Your Friends bear the strong influence of bygone emo-scene stalwarts Sunny Day Real Estate, as well as the still surviving Piebald. The standout power ballad " Great Romances of the 20th Century " starts with a sweet synth flourish and ends with a painful conversation that marks the end of a shattered relationship. Lazzara gets his head out of his diary long enough to incite the mosh pit on the upbeat " Timberwolves at New Jersey, " but that’s an aberration: two songs later he’s getting dumped again on the cathartic " You’re So Last Summer. "

Fortunately, Taking Back Sunday are having better luck in the music industry than in their love lives. Nolan says their new-found punk stardom hasn’t even sunk in yet. " We went from being completely unknown to, literally three months later, playing to a couple hundred kids who were there to see us. We didn’t think we were going to need management, and now we have management working every day on stuff related to the band. It’s pretty amazing. "

Taking Back Sunday perform next Thursday, March 27, at the Palladium in Worcester. Call (508) 797-9696.