Lucky for The Hives, rules were meant to be broken.

See, when the Swedish garage-rock revivalists first got together back in 1993, it was on the condition they'd only put out three albums before packing things in.

Well, it's been almost a year since the release of 2007's The Black and White Album (their fourth, for those keeping track), and they still haven't shown signs of slowing down anytime soon.

On the contrary, the new disc finds them branching out into unexplored musical terrain, alternating their trademark guitar-drenched sound with dips into hip-hop, punk-pop and far more experimental alt-rock.

Guitarist Nicholaus Arson, 29, acknowledges the disc exists in contravention of the Hives' original game plan, but says the band "just felt like we had one more record in our system."

"When we made the three-record rule, we were maybe 15 years old," Arson (born Niklas Almqvist) explains from a tour stop in London, England. "We decided that, in order for us never to suck, we had to quit before we were 30. And we could only release three records, because we didn't think that any of the other bands we liked had released more than three good records.

"But that sort of conservatism fell short of our own. We started liking a lot of fourth and fifth records."

For The Black and White Album -- which arrived amidst great fanfare last fall thanks to the monster single Tick Tick Boom -- the bandmates also allowed themselves to break another one of their founding principals.

"We were never allowed to make demos," says Arson. "We were never allowed to record anything before going into the studio ... we always had to use the first, second or third take. That was very important to us."

This time out, they workshopped more than 30 tracks -- all of them "written" by their phantom svengali figure Randy Fitzsimmons (a likely alias for the entire band, though the pseudonym itself is legally registered to Arson) -- before taking the songs home to finesse them into the demo stage.

Then it was simply a matter of weeding through the excess, a task the Hives carried out in the usual manner.

"We vote, and then we fight, and then we vote again," Arson quips. "In the end, there was a record released, so you can the system works."

Recent years have found The Hives collaborating with the likes of Timbaland, Andre 3000, and Pharrell Williams (who produced seven of the tracks on the new album), and while Arson admits the new influences were intimidating, he says the bandmates quickly realized they had no interest in making the same record they'd already made three times before.

"For a long time, we were very conservative as to what we could and couldn't do," he says, pointing out the new songs are a lot longer than would have been allowed 10 years ago. "But then you paint yourself into a corner and there's only one way out -- which is to dive out the nearest window."

One thing that's survived the band's recent evolution is the high-energy intensity of its live shows, which tend to be characterized by a lot of frantic, frenzied posturing on the part of legendary frontman (and Arson's younger brother) Howlin' Pelle Almqvist.

Lucky for the fans, Arson says the band has no intention of finding a loophole for their live obligations.

"The fact is we try a lot harder than other bands," says Arson, who has a full slate of summer festivals ahead of him, plus a fifth album to start planning for. "We waste tons more energy than other bands do, and we're able to do it for longer periods of time.

"And we have songs that are designed to be good rock 'n' roll. And good rock 'n' roll is something that's supposed to be lived live."