For N.E.R.D., it's time to ramp up production

Neptunes partners and rapper friend tout album, tour

Pharrell Williams (left) and Chad Hugo (right, with N.E.R.D. bandmate Shay Haley) have produced tracks for big-name artists. (Aram boghosian for the boston globe)

NORTHAMPTON - Pharrell Williams is yawning. Because the superstar producer is a gentleman, he excuses himself and promises he's not bored. It's just that he was up late working. In the past few years, he has logged studio time with stars like Jay-Z and Madonna with his Neptunes producing partner, Chad Hugo. In this instance, Williams was actually tinkering with a project even closer to his heart. "We just put the finishing touches on last night," he says with a contented smile, referring to "Seeing Sounds," the third album from his band N.E.R.D., which draws on heavy rock, funk, and soul.

So it's a happy kind of tired for Williams and his N.E.R.D. bandmates Hugo and Shay Haley. On this snowy March night, the trio is lounging in Williams's hotel room here prior to taking the stage at the neighboring Pearl Street Nightclub. Along with Lupe Fiasco and Rihanna, N.E.R.D. will get the crowd ready for Kanye West's "Glow in the Dark" hip-hop extravaganza Thursday at the Tweeter Center.

If the men are worried about going from 700-capacity nightclubs like Pearl Street filled with N.E.R.D. lovers to winning over 20,000 urban music fans more familiar with Neptunes-produced jams like Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot," they don't show it.

"We're used to that," says Haley, the band's resident rapper.

Although spaced out physically in the hotel room - Haley is leaning on the kitchenette on one side of the room, Hugo sits on a loveseat against one wall, and Williams lounges on a couch kitty-corner to that - the trio exudes the tangible bond, both in person and on record, of the childhood friends they are.

For a time in 2005, however, it seemed that, friends or not, there might not be another N.E.R.D. release. In 2002, the critically acclaimed "In Search of. . ." introduced the group's edgy blend of classic '70s soul, '90s rock and hip-hop, and 21st-century funk. But after 2004's "Fly or Die," N.E.R.D. seemed to take a back seat to the increasing demand for Neptunes tracks.

Williams also released a solo album ("In My Mind"), and his sleepy mug and chalky falsetto popped up with growing frequency in videos for artists he was working with. But as the band's name suggests - the acronym stands for No One Ever Really Dies - N.E.R.D. was destined to reconvene, which it did last summer.

"It was never a question," says the soft-spoken Williams, who does most of the talking, to the relief, it seems, of the friendly but clearly more shy Hugo and Haley. The reunion may have been inevitable, but no one can put a finger on why 2008 was the year. "We just felt like it was wide open," says Williams.

"Seeing Sounds," out June 10, derives its title from a condition known as synesthesia, in which the stimulation of one sense evokes another. For example, hearing music produces a visual component for some listeners.

"I thought that everybody heard music that way," says Williams, who is happily afflicted. "And when you realize that people hear music with no visual image attached, it's like 'whoa!' That seems more crazy to me because there's no other interpretation except auditorial. You have no mental representation of anything, so how do you remember millions and millions of songs and sounds?"

The musical criteria for the album, says Williams, was "energy and emotion." He describes the first single, "Everyone Nose," a hard-charging rocker that observes a line of women disappearing into the ladies room to, um, powder their noses, as the musical equivalent of "a can of Red Bull."

Other new songs on display later that night at Pearl Street offer similar sonic jolts. But just as that particular energy drink is not for everyone, Williams and his mates are at peace with the fact that, at this point, N.E.R.D. has not reached the multiplatinum heights of the beneficiaries of the Neptunes' magic. "We'll see what happens this time because it's a different day and age and people are more open to hybrid music," says Williams.

One person who's hoping to see N.E.R.D. raise Williams's profile as a performer is Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, who did a buzzed-about underground remix of Williams's solo album.

"I think that now that he's getting older, there's some more mature things that he would like to do," says Thompson. "But because they associate him [as a producer] with the carefree 'I like the way you move girl'-type thing, I don't know. Is he not allowed to mature? So it's scary, but Pharrell played me four [new] songs, and I was jealous and amazed."

As someone with a little insight into enjoying cult-level success with a band while making his name as a superstar, producer Don Was thinks N.E.R.D. is on a creatively fulfilling path.

"Nowadays if you hand in a record, you better be able to explain to the record company that it's a cross between Nickelback and Rihanna or you're [in trouble,]" says Was, who has worked with everyone from Bonnie Raitt to the Rolling Stones. "They don't know what to make of you if they can't compare you to something else exactly that's selling in the moment. But in the '60s it was an insult to do that. So I think that they're doing something very original and that really fits the pop sensibilities of the time, but it's really innovative."

Williams is uncertain if the new world order of digital distribution and viral video will help or hurt N.E.R.D.

"If a lot of other bands were doing what we're doing, then yeah, it would be a super-duper challenge," he says. "But for us we're with the challenge of something being different. So that's not really a challenge for us - that's what we're used to, being to the left."

And swaggering around the stage somewhere between studied cool and geeky breathlessness, Williams, Hugo, and Haley don't seem concerned whether anyone beyond the 700 people packing Pearl Street tonight come to the left with them. As Williams says before taking the stage, "There's no other feeling you get being on stage with a room full of people who just want to get lost in music."

Sarah Rodman can be reached at srodman@globe.com.