Cage The Elephant On Escaping Kentucky, Sibling Rivalry, Trippy ...

This place was everything to me and Brad,” Matt Shultz says as heavy rain pounds the windshield of his SUV. Shultz, the singer in the modern-rock band Cage the Ele­phant, has parked in the lot of a garden-apartment complex in Bowling Green, Kentucky, next to a building where he and Cage guitarist Brad Shultz, his older brother, spent their childhoods in the late Eighties and the Nineties.

“I wonder what it looks like inside,” Matt, 32, says, looking up at his old home on the second floor. Wiry and talkative with light-brown hair framing still-boyish features, Matt laughs as he recalls the green shag carpet where he would find old bits of breakfast cereal, “like the marshmallows in Lucky Charms,” and eat them like secret treasure. He points to a patch of grass where the local kids, mostly from low-income families, played baseball and at a line of woods where Matt and Brad, now 33, created an imaginary clubhouse, nailing pages from old porno magazines to the trees.

The singer also remembers his father’s absences — Brad Sr. was a long-distance truck driver — and the hand-me-down clothes from older cousins that he and Brad wore to school, reminders of their parents’ constant financial struggles. “Kids in Brad’s grade would gather around him and chant, ‘Poor boy,'” Matt says, still seething. The brothers later responded to those taunts with songwriting. “People talkin’ shit, they can kiss the back of my hand,” Matt sang in “In One Ear,” on his band’s 2008 debut, Cage the Elephant. “I felt an extreme conviction on the first rec­ord,” Matt says, “to get out of this town.”

Founded in Bowling Green a decade ago, Cage the Elephant — Matt, Brad, bassist Daniel Tichenor and drummer Jared Champion — are now based across the state line, in Nashville. They are all married; Brad and Champion are fathers, each with a young daughter. A fifth member, guitarist Lincoln Parish, quit in 2013. But the original four have been tight since adolescence, writing their songs together and crediting them, U2-style, to the group. “If the band broke up, you’re losing somebody you’ve known your whole life,” Brad contends, “not some guy you’ve known for five years.”

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Cage are their hometown’s biggest rock & roll export. That first album went gold and included the platinum single “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked”; 2011’s Thank You, Happy Birthday and 2013’s Melophobia hit the Top 20. Cage’s new album, Tell Me I’m Pretty, produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, is their best yet — melodically taut garage rock with psychedelic flourishes and a fighting edge.

In songs like “Cry Baby” and “Punchin’ Bag,” the spiky Pixies-style tension of Cage’s earlier records has been honed into a pop-smart charge that Brad calls “John Wayne on acid at an Iggy Pop show.” Tichenor, 35, puts it this way: “We’re playing in this style,” he says, pointing to a pile of LPs by the Smiths, T. Rex and the Beatles next to the stereo in his Nashville home, “but moving it forward.”