John Nolan and Shaun Cooper seem to be destined for success — musically, at least.

After parting ways with their previous band, Taking Back Sunday, they returned with a new band, and again found success.

“I think people were surprised,” says Cooper, the band’s bassist. “We’re not a cheap knock-off, or trying to cash in. We went a new direction and they respect that.”

The new direction included being able to expand the band’s sound in any direction they saw fit, which Cooper says was freeing.

For the project, Cooper and Nolan, the band’s guitarist, pianist and primary vocalist, recruited Will Noon to play drums. They also recruited Nolan’s sister, Michelle Nolan, to handle piano and guitar, as well as some vocal duties.

“I’ve been in bands with Will since seventh grade … and we knew Michelle had been writing. She brought a cool, different dynamic,” Cooper says . “Her whole style and sense of melody, plus it’s not very typical to have a girl in a rock band, it’s mainly just dudes.”

After solidifying a line up, the band posted a few tracks online to give eager fans a chance to listen to Straylight Run. The experience, Nolan says, filtered out Taking Back Sunday fans who weren’t into the band’s material, although he says most of them responded positively.

After playing a few shows and hashing out some more songs, the band settled in Woodstock, N.Y. to record its full-length debut for Victory Records.

During the recording process Straylight Run relocated to an isolated studio, where the band found itself alone with its music.

The idea may have sounded good to band members at the time, but both Noon and Nolan agree that it may not have improved the record’s overall quality.

“I don’t know how much it helped, it drove us a little bit crazy. It was a month of nothing — no TV, little Internet, no cell phone reception,” Cooper says.

“The Idea was that we’d have no distractions,” Nolan says. “It’s pretty hard to be distracted anyway, we could have made the same record and gone home every night.”

Regardless of the recording method, the band saw their fan base begin to expand, due in part to its video “Existentialism on Prom Night,” which received airtime on several music video channels.

Though the band has now become popular, Nolan says it came more gradually than the fame he experienced in Taking Back Sunday.

“With Taking Back Sunday it was actually quite — in a lot of ways — sudden,” Nolan says. “In three months we went from playing to nobody, to playing huge, sold out shows.

“With this band it has been much more gradual; we’ve been a band for a year and a half and we started out playing these smaller places. In that way the band has worked out really well.”

Who: Straylight Run with Action Action, Bella Lea, and Firescape

Where: M- shop

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

Cost: $9 student, $11 public