Michael Stipe of R.E.M., once the premier rock band from America. Its sales and influence have waned.

By ALAN LIGHT

ATHENS, Georgia - On the ground floor of a plain building, a few blocks from the University of Georgia campus here, sits a little room stuffed with instruments and decorated with Christmas lights, old concert posters and pinned-up vinyl records. R.E.M. started rehearsing in this space in 1985, and it looks as if nothing has changed.
This is a place to work not hang out, and work is what Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills were doing on this March afternoon, blasting through 13 songs over the course of a few hours. It was their first day of rehearsal for the shows that would introduce their hard-charging new album, “Accelerate” : later in the week they performed at the Langerado festival in Florida, followed by a date at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. (The band is touring in North America and Europe through September.)
“We never do much rehearsal,” said Mr. Buck, 51, the band’s guitarist . “Sometimes having that little edge of not feeling comfortable with the songs gives it a little bit of energy. Terror will do that.”
Despite spending 28 years together, at this moment a touch of fear is understandable for the trio. (The fourth member, the drummer, Bill Berry, left the band in 1997, following a brain aneurysm.) From its debut in 1981 until the mid-1990s R.E.M. was a definitive American rock band, but its sales and influence have steadily declined in the last decade. “Accelerate” is a very deliberate response to an internal crisis that Mr. Stipe, the group’s singer, described as major, and that they all agreed almost broke up the band.
Its last album, the hazy, somber “Around the Sun” (2004), took nine months to make and satisfied neither the musicians nor their fans. It sold less than 250,000 copies. The band members realized they needed to find a new way to work together or quit, coming to the end of a road that took them from this college town to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“If you’re a music fan who has 15 artists you follow, and one of them kind of takes a nose dive - well, that’s disappointing, but you’ll move on,” Mr. Stipe said. “But to us this is everything that we do.”
Mr. Buck said he had few commercial expectations and was much more concerned about making fans believe in the band again. “Whatever we did on the last record didn’t work,” he said. “I wasn’t happy with it, and I don’t think anyone else was. Michael tends to think that the longer you work on something, the better it can be. But it doesn’t work that way for us. It just kept getting weirder and weirder and worse.”
Mr. Stipe, 48, said the turmoil started as soon as Mr. Berry left the band. “Any 5-year-old can figure out that with four people, you can have two very clear sides, but with three people, one person is always left out,” he said.
The aptly titled “Accelerate” is an album that should please R.E.M.’s old fans. Recorded in a matter of weeks rather than months, with 11 songs totaling less than 35 minutes, it’s a steady blast of short, sharp rockers, a breathless tumble of harmonies.
The album is reminiscent of R.E.M. favorites like “Lifes Rich Pageant” and “Document,” from the mid-1980s , but it avoids the feel of nostalgia.
In separate conversations each band member brought up U2 as a comparison. In the ‘80s and ‘90s the two groups conquered the pop world while remaining true to their principles, blazing a trail for the alternative movement that came in their wake. The bands remain friendly, but along the way R.E.M. ceded the spotlight while U2 remained a stadium-filling act. “We’ve been the biggest band in the world, and it was great, but it’s not a career goal for us,” said Mr. Mills, 49.
In the years since R.E.M.’s breakthrough, Mr. Stipe has often served as a mentor to younger rockers. “I don’t like being the advice guy, but it is part of who I am,” he said. “Be it Kurt Cobain or Conor Oberst or Chris Martin or Thom Yorke, there is a little club of people who do this weird thing as a job. I’ve just done it longer, so I can tell them to expect to go into a depression after a tour, or that acupuncture isn’t a bad thing.”
At dinner, while they passed plates of food and laughed about disastrous travel experiences, it felt like the unity that propels “Accelerate” isn’t something they left in the recording studio.
Mr. Stipe said: “We’ve been through some dark times together. But there’s a humor, there’s a camaraderie, there’s an absurdity to the daily ins and outs of what life can throw at you and how well you deal with it. And we happen to be in a very good place right now.”