Since they exploded out of Alberta some 13 years ago, Nickelback has been hit-making, multi-platinum band whose last album, 2005's All The Right Reasons is one of the most successful of the century, and has stoked great expectations for the quartet's sixth album, Dark Horse. A lesser group might rest on its proverbial laurels and assume the world is anxiously waiting for it, but Nickelback -- Kroeger, his brother and bassist Mike Kroeger, guitarist Ryan Peake and drummer Daniel Adair -- still feel like a new album is a fresh opportunity to prove themselves.

Nickelback is ahead of those odds, and will continue to pulverize them with Dark Horse, an 11-track survey of everything the group has done so well to this point -- fist-pumping anthems, grinding rockers, soaring power ballads, grinning sexual innuendo, heart-wringing romanticism, choruses that stick in your ears after the first listen and hooks so big they practically boomerang through the songs.

And while Mike Kroeger contends that Dark Horse "isn't affecting some huge departure from our past efforts," it does find the band working in some fresh -- and rarefied -- rock 'n' roll territory. It marks the first time Nickelback has worked with an outside producer since Silver Side Up  in 2001, but considering that producer is Robert John "Mutt" Lange, he of AC/DC "Back in Black," Def Leppard "Pyromania" and "Hysteria" and Foreigner "4" fame, it's easy to understand why the group was willing to open up the inner sanctum again.

Nickelback's track record certainly speaks to the group's stature. The group has sold 27 million albums worldwide and, since the 2001 breakthrough of "How You Remind Me," has sent 13 singles rocketing onto the various Billboard charts, expanding its solid foothold in rock markets to the Top 40 world.

All The Right Reasons did set a high bar for Dark Horse, but the members of Nickelback say they felt a different kind of pressure when they sat down with Lange to start working on the new album.

Work on Dark Horse began in March, after Nickelback made its long-awaited contact with Lange. The band traveled to the producer's home base in Switzerland to begin going over song ideas. The tunes came from a variety of directions; for instance the dynamically swelling "If Today Was Your Last Day," had been around for awhile but hadn't been finished. "Chad brought it out of the vault and the creative juices started to flow," Mike Kroeger notes.  Then there's "This Afternoon," whose acoustic, rootsy flavor, along with some downright country-style guitar licks represent a refreshing departure from the Nickelback norm. "It's a big-time part of our background," Mike Kroeger notes, "that whole laid-back, barroom kind of feel. Where we grew up everybody listened to country. I would say that song's our 'Friends In Low Places,' y'know?"

Dark Horse's other songs -- recorded during the summer at Chad Kroeger's converted barn studio in Vancouver -- traverse a wide terrain, from the arcing melodic ebb and flow of the first single, "Gotta Be Somebody" and the metallic groove of "Burn It To The Ground" to the heavy riffery of "Something In Your Mouth" and "The Next Go Round" and the inspiring balladry of "You'll Never Be Alone" and "I'd Come For You." "We're a rock band," Peake says. "We like to get heavy and we do like to write stuff that's melodic and maybe a little more mellow. It's nice to have both, and it's nice to have both accepted by the fans. There are some bands that can only put out one kind of thing, but our fans are pretty open so we don't get stuck in one place."

Mike Kroeger adds that, "I think people expect that level of effort or level of 'quality' from us. We don't pen ourselves into one identity; we're just trying out new things and doing some things we haven't done before...and making sure that it's as good as it can be and the cleanest and most refined version of what we do."

That's what comes honestly for Nickelback, and it seems to work time and again.

Even when it's applied to a self-declared, multi-platinum dark horse.