It’s much closer to afternoon than it is to morning on a drizzly Saturday, and the Teeth are just sitting down to breakfast at Billy’s Downtown Diner, a Bethlehem eatery with an upscale lighting scheme and a menu to match.

For all but drummer Jonas Oesterle, the breakfast in Bethlehem is a bit of a homecoming. Because while the band has long been claimed by Philadelphia as the city’s native sons, three of the Teeth—guitarist Brian Ashby and twin brothers guitarist Aaron MoDavis and bassist Peter MoDavis — have always been slouching towards Bethlehem, the town where they lived before heading to Philadelphia to attend college.

Since that initial move to Philadelphia six years ago, the four-piece has been on a steady upward climb. Less than two years ago, the Teeth’s Myspace page listed the band’s friends as a few handfuls short of 200. Now, that same friends list has expanded to more than 3000 fans who frequently comment about how much each one loves the band or with pleas for them to play certain areas. And many of these new fans first fell in love when the band toured the country last year, a trip that finished with the Teeth’s first visit to South by Southwest.

The band is set to make the trip again this spring with Park the Van labelmates and longtime cohorts, Dr. Dog, and it’s this impending trip that has brought the band to Bethlehem. After being thrown out of their Northeast Philadelphia practice-and-studio space in October, the Teeth have been polishing songs from the upcoming “You’re My Lover Now” (which will be released on 24 April) in the basement of the MoDavis’ childhood home.

Just as with the Teeth’s last release, 2005’s “Carry the Wood” EP, the band recorded Lover entirely on their own. “I don’t think we ever considered not recording it ourselves,” Peter says.

For “Lover,” the band upgraded from the 16-track digital recorder used for “Carry the Wood” to a full-on studio setup. “I think it took like, six months to figure everything out,” Peter says. “But once we had a system down, it went pretty quickly.”

Originally, the album was titled “Deranged!!!!!!!,” but the Teeth decided to scrap the working title in favor of something less punctuated. “We could have done it tastefully with the album art we had,” Peter says with insistence, “but we figured nobody else would think it’s funny but us.”

The band won’t divulge exactly what the album art is (“You’ll have to wait and see it when [the album] comes out,” Peter says), other than it is a photo taken by a friend, Laura McKinley.

And just like with the album’s artwork, the Teeth are hesitant to reveal the details of the album but do concede that many of the songs were gleaned from the band’s setlist from the past year and a half. “Look for more of the same, but different,” Aaron says.

But with the Teeth’s discursive nature, looking for more of the same isn’t easy. On earlier albums, like 2002’s “Send My Regards to the Sunshine,” the band more than hinted at showhands-y cabaret. But by the time “Carry the Wood” was released, the Teeth were mellow, romantic and sentimental with a taste for gauzy ballads and barroom sing-a-longs.

This type of meandering makes the urge to compare the Teeth to someone — or at least something — so great. There are underlying elements of cheeks-flushed integrity and self-deprecating confidence to be reckoned with; this gives the four-piece a pub band quality, but there’s more to the Teeth than the stale smell of beer.

At any moment, the band could be slightly reminiscent of the Talking Heads or the Kinks or Tom Waits or even a combination of any of the Elephant 6-ers, but these sloppy, one-note comparisons never suffice. Rather, there is only one way to describe the Teeth, and that is with a string of adjectives that never quite settle correctly.

At practice later in the day, the Teeth are working on the harmonies for a song from the new album, “The Trumpets Blared.” The band tears apart the first half of the song, playing and replaying the same parts. In the first half hour, the band never finishes the song before moving onto the same type of deconstruction and reconstruction for another song, “Shoulderblade.”

It’s this type of dedication that has kept the Teeth going. “We seem to be going the right way, I don’t know. At least I hope we are,” Peter says.

There is no doubt that the Teeth have always been going in the right direction.

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