Who: Felix Rodriguez, guitarist for Swedish pop/New Wave phenoms The Sounds

Why: They’re opening for No Doubt at Cruzan Amphitheatre Wednesday night, along with Paramore

Why you might know them: The songs “Living In America,”  “Painted By Numbers” and the addictive “Nobody Sleeps When I’m Awake” from their latest album “Crossing The Rubicon.” Plus, lead singer Maja Ivarsson was featured on the silly but also addictive single “Snakes On A Plane (Bring It)” from the silly movie of the same name.

Something you might notice: Like tour headliner No Doubt’s lead singer Gwen Stefani, Ivarsson and Paramore front woman Hayley Williams are all hot blond women whose other bandmates are all dudes.

“I don’t know what No Doubt thought about it, if they had a theme or something,” Rodriguez says, “but it’s a really good package. All the bands have a lot of energy in a different way. The whole show is a lot of fun from beginning to end, a lot of energy. The combination of all three bands is a perfect combination.”

What the album title is all about: A lot of the songs on “Crossing The Rubicon,” a phrase that signals a symbolic crossing over a line that can’t be crossed back over, were written out of the “frustration” the band felt dealing with “some of the people working around us, label-wise,” while at New Line Records, Rodriguez says.

So The Sounds made the decision to “buy ourselves out of our contract” and start their own label, Amioki Records — “The more we talked about it, the more it made sense to make it ourselves. We picked every one we wanted to work with. We financed the whole thing ourselves and listened to people who wanted to work with us because they believe in us, not because they get a paycheck at the end of the month.”

The album’s just come out, and the band hopes they made the right decision. “If it doesn’t do well, we can only blame ourselves,” Rodriguez says. “But we’ll still know we made a great album.”

OK. So what does it sound like?: “I think the fans are gonna hear something emotional. Some of it is melancholy and some is upbeat. It’s a Sounds album, definitely. We feel that there is some of the frustration there, but it’s all great. We’re really happy now.”

Felix’s favorite thing about touring in the U.S.: “There’s a culture of live music in the States that is much, much better than in other places. Sometimes we play (in the U.S.) and talk to fans, and they’ll tell you ‘I drove five or six hours to see you, and I never even heard the music, but I heard a lot about you.’ In Sweden, it’s not like that. Here people go to live shows and discover bands just by word of mouth sometimes….It’s amazing, coming from a little country, to be playing in front of thousands of people.”

Bringing back the old school: Rodriguez says that it was important to the band to make “Crossing The Rubicon” a true cohesive album, not simply a collection of a few singles and some filler songs “that are not that good and you don’t barely pay any attention to the names of them. They’re just a number on your Ipod. We wanted this to be more like those classic bands’ albums that keep growing on you, where there is a complete album that gives you a feeling that lasts a long time. It’s not just an album with some tracks.”

The PE connection: Rodriguez says that in his youth, he was “the biggest Public Enemy fan,” which is interesting to those of us who don’t immediately associate blond Swedish children with militant African-American political expression. I’m so close-minded.

“If you didn’t understand the slang, the message was a good message,” he says, “about stuff going on in the world and what’s wrong with society. That inspired us as well. We don’t write the same lyrics as they do, and we see the world from a different side. But you can write from your own point of view and still inspire other people. I was a kid of 12 or 13, and we didn’t have English, but I totally got it, that people are fighting for what they believe in and are making other people understand what they are fighting for.”

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