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East Coast rock band the Wrens will perform Friday in Westwood Plaza. The band’s latest alb

Charles Bissell is a natural born rock singer. His chords don’t have an effortless cool like Lou Reed’s, but instead a kind of natural brashness, an every-word-counts urgency that can turn even the most pedestrian lines into a keening credo.

But he’s hardly a natural-born rock star. At the finance department of a New York-based ad agency, 39-year-old Bissell is whispering into the phone, trying to avoid his boss and wishing his little cubicle would offer a bit more privacy. To make things worse, he’s fighting off a nasty cold. “You see, as we reach our middle years, healing becomes an issue,” he quips in a mock tone, as if to acknowledge the issue of age first.

His band, the Wrens, has been together for 15 years, but last year’s “The Meadowlands” is only its third record, and its first in seven years. Each member works a desk job in the city, where interview days aren’t license to get off work, not when sick days and vacation times are precious commodities reserved for tours that venture out of the tri-state area. The Wrens have already tried to live the rock star lifestyle they once coveted, yet circumstance seems to have told the band that it’s not for them. But with the runaway success of “The Meadowlands,” fate finally seems to be turning their way.

Anyone familiar with the Wrens is by now familiar with “Secaucus,” the album they quietly released on Grass Records in 1996. The 23-track melange of nervy energy, angular guitars and sweet melodies sounded loud and clear amid a stale landscape of post-grunge and adult alternative.

But the band’s safe haven changed when Grass Records was bought out by millionaire Alan Melzter that year. Before he went on to discover Creed and Evanescence, Melzter offered the four friends from South Jersey a million-dollar contract. The band balked, and soon enough Melzter pulled all support for the band’s European tour, forcing the group to return home and rethink their trajectory.

The Wrens didn’t want the binding contract, but they wanted to record, and a Drive-Thru Records compilation in 1999 seemed to signal a new future. Sandwiched between a pack of pop punk and third wave ska acts like New Found Glory, Fenix TX and Allister, it seemed the Wrens had found a new home.

But the single “Miss Me” conjured none of the youthful energy that propelled “Secaucus” three years prior, and it had none of its offhand vocal interplay, at least none that could be parsed from the song’s unforgiving wall of distortion and power chords. Standing in awkward compromise between arena rock and pop-punk, it was jarring and repetitive and frankly wasn’t any good. Drive-Thru entered into a deal with MCA, and the Wrens jumped that ship, too.

Then, all of a sudden, things changed.

“One day we all just looked at each other and went, what the hell have we been doing?” said guitarist Greg Whelan. “This is ridiculous, trying to write hit songs for major labels. We just started not to even care about that anymore. And that’s when the record started coming together and we were able to finish it.”

“Miss Me” actually takes the form of “Boys, You Won’t” off last year’s record. After about four years of erasing and rewriting, the once stagnant track now builds and preens. It’s cleaner but more wounded, and the lyrics that once dealt with a lost girl now tell the story of the band. The rest of the album similarly coalesced in time.

Drummer Jerry MacDonald, 37, now has a wife, a mortgage and three kids. The rest of the band still lives together in New Jersey, where they continue to hold onto their day jobs and mull the possibility of making the band a fuller commitment.

“When we got done, (we) were so enthused about it, like we’re at the top of our game, in a way that we haven’t felt in 10 years or more,” says Bissell. “It’s just really … cool.”

The Wrens perform Friday at noon at Westwood Plaza.