Listen. Think. Repeat.

It’s not easy growing up. Just ask the Futureheads. Two years ago, the four young men from Sunderland, England, pogoed around the world with their cheeky self-titled debut. The group seemed built from post-punk dynamics first popularized in the early ’80s, plus charisma and a healthy amount of sarcasm.

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News and Tributes is a far different beast. The opening track, with its oblique lyrics — “Some people believe we are the sum of our parts/I don’t believe, I don’t believe it’s smart/To try and explain such a complicated thing/Shameless expression is pride of a king,” sings guitarist/vocalist Barry Hyde on “Yes/No” — announces the disc will be about diffuse pleasures. Subsequent songs like “Cope” and the pleasingly harmonic “Skip to the End” morph into different melodic tones and rhythms with little of the sharp angularity that marked The Futureheads.

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The title News and Tributes, Hyde says, is not only taken from one of the songs but also a summary of the quartet’s evolution from happy-go-lucky kids to a rock band eager to establish a long musical career. “I think that song kind of highlights how much progression we’ve made. I think News and Tributes has this air of seriousness to it that most people don’t realize we have, because our first album is quite a jovial affair,” he says.

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The Futureheads first formed in 2000 with Hyde, bassist David “Jaff” Craig, drummer Pete Brewis and guitarist Ross Millard. (Hyde’s brother, Dave Hyde, replaced Brewis shortly afterward.) Much of the band’s early hyperactive energy, Hyde explains, bore out of playing the songs live for years before they were finally issued via a handful of acclaimed singles and a debut album in 2003 and 2004. His lyrics on songs like “A to B” and “Decent Days and Nights” address superficial relationships with biting wit. “And you thought that I was joking/I said you were a moron/When I said it I was smiling/So you’d think that I was joking,” he sings on “Meantime,” a number about “False conversations/Why waste the time?”

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“I wrote a lot of my songs for the first album when I was in my teenage years, from the age of 17 to 21. During that time, I didn’t have that much experience with personal relationships, just a lot of views on social behavior,” says Hyde. With the success of The Futureheads, he adds, “we’ve kind of accidentally been given the chance to almost leave our immediate society. In Sunderland, we don’t experience that much, so you have to maybe change your style to make it a little bit more introspective, a little bit more about what you’re feeling than what you think other people are feeling.” Perhaps News and Tributes, which Hyde says is poppy and left-field in comparison to more rhythmic arrangements on The Futureheads, attempts to bridge the gap between the four members’ natural introspection and newly won worldliness.

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News and Tributes is part of a wave of albums from a generation of former buzz acts (others include the Stills, Secret Machines, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) trying to grow out of the raucous, ultra-trendy dance-rock sounds that first brought them acclaim. Ironically, reviews for nearly all of these follow-up albums are mixed, and illustrate how critics and fans are seemingly — and perhaps unfairly — ready to abandon these former favorite groups for the next hipster revolution.

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Sometimes needlessly complicated, other times ingeniously quirky, News and Tributes requires repeated listening. It’s no sophomore slump, but it doesn’t have the blithe grace of The Futureheads, either. It’s reminiscent of XTC’s Black Sea, an influential band’s ungainly transition from chirpy punk to warm Beatle-esque pop.

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“It’s an album for people who love to chew on their food, you know what I’m saying? It’s an album you can get a lot out of if you’re willing to put your passion into it as a listener. It’s not for people who want music on in the background,” says Hyde. “The first listen is going to almost be like a question mark. The listener’s going to be going, ‘Is this the band? Is this the Futureheads?’”