For The Von Bondies, the most important reason to make music isn’t a complicated one. “We’re here to entertain people so they forget that they have a 9 to 5 job to go to in the morning,” says Jason Stollsteimer, the Michigan-based band’s singer-songwriter-guitarist. “We love what we do or else we wouldn’t do it; it’s for us and the fans.”

With the February 2009 release of Love, Hate and Then There’s You, the Von Bondies’ third studio album and their debut for Majordomo Records (a division of Shout! Factory), those fans will experience a band that’s come a long way since 2004’s smash album Pawn Shoppe Heart. Now in their ninth year together, Stollsteimer and drummer Don Blum, the Von Bondies’ other founding member, have taken their music to new places while holding on to the core values they’ve always exhibited.

“Maybe it’s a cliché but I think the songwriting is more advanced,” says Blum, who co-wrote two songs on the album—his first-ever efforts at penning material for the Von Bondies. “Before it was more of a single riff going the whole time and we had a stripped-down, bluesy, almost punk rock kind of approach. But we’d done that for so long, and we wanted to do something new.”