Gainesville’s Against Me! tapped Butch Vig, the man behind the boards for Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” to produce its major label debut, last year’s “New Wave.”

Like “Nevermind,” “New Wave” boasts a brilliant, muscular sound that puts the band on a more accessible sonic plane without compromising the band’s essentially toughness.

It’s a pretty natural progression from 2005’s “Searching for a Former Clarity.” But it’s a quantum leap from the band’s humble beginnings as singer Tom Grabel and his acoustic guitar, playing anywhere he could.

Whenever a group of rough-and-tumble punks adopts a more commercially viable approach, inevitably there are howls of protest and cries of “sell out.”

But Gabel doesn’t seem interested in preaching to the choir. He has a message that needs to be heard by people who don’t know how much more music can be than just entertainment.

Albums such as “London Calling” and “Entertainment!” had a profound effect on how I looked at the world. The Clash and Gang of Four made music that reflected the world I saw on the news and read about in the papers and was starting to experience as I entered adulthood.

“New Wave” feels like those albums do, whether Gabel is writing about an aging junkie (“Thrash Unreal” ) or U.S. foreign policy (“American Abroad” ) or the power of music to change, if not the world, then your world (the title track).

When on that song, Gabel sings, “We can be the bands we want to hear,” he sums up 30-plus years of musical defiance. Maybe it’s ironic that he does so on a professionally produced, major label release. But that’s what takes “New Wave” into the mall and onto iTunes. That’s true insurrection.

Against Me! performs Oct. 3 at Jannus Landing in St. Petersburg.