By Robbie Mackey

San Diego’s Black Heart Procession was never a band du jour. When the moody four-piece formed in 1997, the blog world was still far from buzzing, file-sharing programs had yet to change the game entirely and bringing music to the masses was a responsibility of MTV, not MySpace. Any aging hipster will tell you, it was a time when independent bands won fans on the back of good records, long tours and good old fashioned word of mouth.

Black Heart—helmed by songwriters Tobias Nathanial and Pall Jenkins—did it by the book, releasing three albums of macabre mood-rock, flying under the radar of mainstream music press and touring the shit out of America. Today, the band’s noir-ish dirges and pulpy melodrama matter for the best of reasons: their songs are consistently good.

“Black Heart is this weird isolated thing,” says Nathanial, on the phone from his new home in Portland. “We tend to write well in a certain way, and I think we always will. It’s great for us to have that, and it’s also challenging to push that into other directions and come up with fresh music that varies from each record.”

In 2002, Nathanial and Jenkins puffed the chest of their creepy songs. Recorded in San Diego with a group of close friends, Amore Del Tropico was a brilliant departure from the spooky sketches featured on earlier work. While the first three Black Heart albums bore a stark, simple stylistic approach, Amore was the sound of Black Heart tinkering and experimenting to lush and exotic results. Although the album was clearly the band’s most stunning collection of songs, recreating the expansive tracks (sometimes played by 20 or so musicians) was an absolute bitch.

“After Amore, we needed a break,” says Nathanial. “We’d been going pretty strong for six or seven years before that. We’d just gotten the studio put together, and Pall was excited about using that. So he recorded some bands, and I moved to Portland and got married. So we took some time off and rejuvenated a little bit.”

Earlier this year, a revitalized Black Heart emerged with a new disc entitled The Spell—a witchy, angry album about love and/or war that signaled the return of Nathaniel and Jenkins’ economical approach.

“That was actually one of the few deliberate decisions about this record,” says Nathaniel, of the choice to stay small. “We had the equipment, and the initial excitement about that stuff was over with. We just wanted to make a record with the people who were going to be going on tour. A really good record that wasn’t too complicated and maintained the spirit of the songs and wasn’t too difficult to play live.”

And The Spell is just that: a smart, direct album that Black Heart can play night in and night out, all over America, to the fans they’ve spent 10 years stockpiling the old fashioned way.

July 31. Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie Sts.), 212-533-2111; 8, $17.