If there’s one person the members of OK Go are grateful for, it’s John Madden.

“Dude, I totally, like, never heard of your band, but I, like, got Madden, and, like, touchdown!” says OK Go’s lead vocalist Damian Kulash, channeling his inner fan to impersonate a recent interaction with an admirer.

After having one of its songs appear on Electronic Art’s “Madden NFL 2002” video game, OK Go has found itself immortalized in the annals of digital entertainment.

“That was definitely the smartest thing we ever did in terms of reaching fans we wouldn’t have,” Kulash says.

The band has spent the last few months recording its album in a place where American football is as foreign as John Madden is obese.

That place is Sweden, the pioneer of death metal and delicious meatballs. After frequenting a local pub, Kulash soon became exposed to a number of musical oddities.

Even with said influences, don’t expect OK Go to wear matching spandex and piano key neckties.

“Our last record we were really excited about making a real synthetic, supernatural perfection of everything,” Kulash says.

OK Go’s next album is not nearly as overproduced and sheeny, Kulash says.

“It’s pretty smile heavy, but there’s also a running current of disaster on this album,” he says.

Shying away from modern rock grandiosity, OK Go finds itself leaning toward a Pixies classic rock sound, Kulash says, with a little bit of disco and Prince thrown in for good measure. Coupled with this newfound roughness is an accompanying vehicle.

“We have — get this — a Dodge Magnum,” he says, referring to their latest tour transportation. It was given to them by Dodge to test its durability.

The sheer masculinity of it, Kulash says, makes the whole band feel inadequate.

“It’s the testosterone-mobile … a station wagon smeared in manness,” says Kulash.

Even with the pretensions associated with rock ‘n’ roll stardom, OK Go keeps level-headed with Ping-Pong, otherwise known to them as “the little tennis.”

To prove its dedication to its favorite pastime, the band has even produced an instructional video on its Web site, okgo.net.

“We really wanted to bring Ping-Pong to the people,” Kulash says.

When OK Go isn’t informing the ignorant about “the little tennis,” it also plays music.

In coming to the Maintenance Shop, Kulash says he appreciates the more intimate setting of a small venue.

“I don’t think that stadium rock necessarily has to be played in a stadium to be enormous and majestic … playing ‘Get Over It’ to a small crowd of extremely sweaty people is at least as satisfying, if not more, than playing it to a big crowd of many thousands,” Kulash says.

As for future tours?

“The Harlem Globetrotters are going back out and we’re going to try and tour with them,” Kulash says.

What: OK Go, Divide by Zero

Where: M-Shop

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Cost: $11 students, $13 public